A Brief Two Part Note With Future Updates

Point the first, my friend Roberto Oeste’s game Gnomoria is up on Steam Greenlight to get it available through that service. Currently, it’s available directly through his site and Desura but visibility on Steam would be amazing and a great opportunity for a one-man dev team. If you wave your cursor in this direction and click, it will take you to the Greenlight page for Gnomoria and I would sure love it if you could help him out with some upward thumbs.

Point the second, while backing up some old machines, I have discovered all of my old source files for the Flash videos on here. Tremendous! That means I can re-export them and get them on YouTube which would be more convenient for everyone. As an additional crazy thing, a half-created, unreleased video was discovered which I will attempt to clean up and smooth over and get up here.  A brand new unreleased thing! Also, I have been tooling around in Unity in my off time on a few video game ideas. One of them is a Dungeon Keeper evolution but the announcement of Impire has muted my enthusiasm. More on those as they develop.

I attended PAX this year and it was another really fun, crowded year. It seems the smart thing to do is to not get too caught up looking at the new big games because those are mostly very well known. It’s better to wander around and look for unknown games and see what’s up with them. Spy Party is still really cool, RetroGrade looks like it might release sometime, and there’s a Netrunner revival!

Stay frosty.

Gnomoria: Dig Up A Thing With Some Gnomes

Another new game! A friend of mine, Mr. “RoboB0b”, is making this game called Gnomoria. It is a Dwarf Fortress-like… frontier simulator? I’m not sure what that genre should be called. You command a small platoon of gnomes to mine mountains, craft objects, and ward off invaders in a randomly generated world. Except with an interface that a normal human brain can understand.

Must dig.
Some gnomes attempting to conquer a mountain.

It’s in an alpha state currently. There’s a short video describing the initial stages of setting up a settlement. There’s a demo for it that lets you try up to six days of surviving. Or you can buy it for $7.99 while it’s still in alpha.

Toy Soldiers PC, Ascend: New Gods, and a set of tools

A number of things have just recently happened. Firstly, a project I worked on almost entirely by myself ended up on Steam. It is Toy Soldiers (the original) and it is available now! If you haven’t played it on Xbox yet, now might be an ok time to do so. There is a patch coming up. It’s a good patch. Please buy it. Some of that money goes to me!

Secondly, Signal Studios just announced their new game, Ascend: New Gods. I work there! Do people know I work there? I do. Ascend is an action RPG with a pretty interesting riff on concurrent multiplayer. Concurrent multiplayer, AKA playing the same game but not technically in the same space. You can see the echoes of other players in the same area you are and interact. You can send them stuff to aid them or curse them. I was trying to get my coworkers killed while they were testing  the E3 demo, and that is pretty fun.

Thirdly, I work on the tools that Signal uses and they are pretty cool and I’m proud of my contributions. You cannot play the tools and will probably never see them but I’m still proud. That’s probably not interesting news for anyone besides me.

An Update From Some Time Later: I should note that there is no release date or pricing information about Ascend just yet. Only Toy Soldiers for XBox Live Arcade and on Steam. Also Toy Soldiers: Cold War which is only on XBLA. For now? Question mark?

Final Fantasy vs Final Fantasy 7

Well. We were all young once. Right? Somehow I have found this one the most difficult to watch so far. I obviously thought it was funny at the time or I wouldn’t have put effort into it. The world may never know why though. On the Newgrounds page for this one, it mentions that I like FF and FF7 equally. Modern day me has to disagree. FF is fairly unplayable today. It’s very archaic. FF7 is also very archaic but less so. In conclusion, they’re both bad games?

Also, a note: a bunch of comments were removed due to user error. I have now rectified that problem. This site gets a surprising amount of spam bots attacking it and some legit comments were lost in the struggle. I should probably slap a captcha on the comment form. But a different day.

Original Air Date: TO BE DETERMINED

Black Belt Vs Thief

I very nearly misspelled Thief in the title just now. Embarrassing.

Man! Look at the production values on this one! This is the second short I ever made and it it a whole hell of a lot better than I remember it being. Figuring out that higher frame rates look better, rotating guys, better tweens in general. Still didn’t quite master editing images in MS Paint though. A few white pixels peeking out there. I remember thinking how I was going to blow everyone’s minds!! when the Mortal Kombat song kicks in and the guys start running around. Even though breaking the Final Fantasy battle system convention was the exact same joke from the original. Maybe I thought record scratches were still novel and interesting. It is still the default dimensions for a Flash animation. Adorable.

I just went digging a little deeper through my Ye Olde Flashe Shite folder and there is a lot of stuff in there. A couple unfinished, unreleased things. Also lots of 8-bit Theater derivative jokes.

Original Air Date: TO BE DETERMINED

Crono vs Black Mage (Boy vs Sprite 3)

Ever so briefly, here is the third in the “Boy vs Sprite” series. Except, as the loading screen mentions, it does not focus on them at all. It’s a number of characters I like. Some of the spell effects made me realize I am not a very good graphic designer. Also a lot of the end parts feel really tacked on. But I do like the slow motion impact of the scythe. There was a note in the credits about sound effects but this appears to be one of the first ones where I was dropping all sounds effects because they were time consuming. Weird.

Oh, this one’s plot was fleshed out by a set up short from a fan and I feel kind of strange about if I should throw that one up here or not since it’s not really mine. I’ll leave it up to Future Me to figure out.

Continue reading Crono vs Black Mage (Boy vs Sprite 3)

Boy vs Sprite 2

Man, this is some pretty nerdy stuff. This one starts on another common co-op problem in Secret of Mana, standing at the edge of the screen like an asshole. And then a whole lot of unrelated violence happens ending with Crono showing up for revenge. His motives were only revealed in a separate short that I did not even make! Real nerdy stuff.  It’s a definite improvement over the last one. I was really excited about the arrows flying in from the side. I remember finding sound effects for all this stuff was really annoying. That’s why I ended up transitioning to more music-video-y kinds of things. No responsibility for audio design!

Continue reading Boy vs Sprite 2

Video gaa-aaames

So sometimes I have opinions about video games and then those opinions are later altered through new information. Something along those lines has happened with the new Syndicate game Starbreeze is working on. For those who don’t know, they are making an FPS that seems generally inspired by that ancient DOS game Syndicate. I was pretty bummed initially, because I figured it would be Deus Ex being made by a different company. But then this new trailer was released that seems to show a way more responsive version of Deus Ex. Having played a bit of DX:HR recently, I find myself pretty excited to play a jackbooted future-thug bad guy counterpart to DX:HR’s not-asking-for-this heroic protagonist. I enjoyed being the cyber-good guy, but both facets of the corporation-controlled dystopia spacefuture are interesting to delve. So now I am kind of excited about it and mad at myself. Same thing happened with that new XCOM game they’re making.

Further reporting on Giant Bomb makes it sound like the thug/player character/agent Miles Kilo will eventually break free of company control and stare at his hands in a very dramatic way while the crushing weight of his crimes washes over him before he sets out to take down the corporation – from the inside! – but that is somewhat expected, I guess. Expected but disappointing. The original Syndicate’s end goal of worldwide corporate domination might be a hard sell to people who do not think that darkly of the future. Who knows, though, people love the fuck out of all that zombie stuff.