Storytelling in games.

Everyone loves a good story, from films to books a good story has been used to entertain for centuries, but what about these new fangled videogames the kids are all talking about, these things let you shoot aliens and drive race-cars, surely they don't need stories.
Stories are an important part of games today, a lot more than the space invaders era, small games that are for picking up and playing for 5 minutes don't really need a plot but the bigger budget shooters and RPG's almost always have some sort of story even if it is a really cheesy one.
Story telling in games seems a lot harder than a book or a film because the player has to be a certain character and it can feel unnatural for the character who you are playing to be speaking for you, some games like to make the main character a total mute but this can look really awkward. I think half life 2 did this pretty well but there were some wierd moments when people were talking to you and you just waved a crowbar around at them. Also books usually are told from a third person perspective and this isnt possible for games as you cant be telling yourself the story and living it out at the same time.
Every man and his dog knows that RPG's are the main story tellers in games, i don't really play that many myself and most the stories are too fantasy like for me, RPG games are basically big stories with random battles shoved in everywhere and seem to keep some people happy.
To me it is important for a game to have a story, the games i remember most are the ones that keep you interested on whats going to happen next, i don't find it as important as gameplay but it is a core part of a game. Some games are open ended enough to allow you to create your own stories and your own character, these games can be very immersive and sets a story up with a setting and background instead of your father being killed by a big evil man and you have to get revenge or something.
A games setting does a lot for its story and feel, games like half life 2 are good as the background is believable enough for you to think its a real world with its own people and customs. This is created with art styles and some dialogue, games that let you create your own little stories for the extra characters around you gets extra brownie points in my book.


(Everyones going to mention final fantasy... to be honest i dont think that final fantasy 7's story was very good, it had a good setting i guess but the dialogue was horrible, i think its more down to it being many peoples first real experience of a story being in a game and people still remember how fond they where at the time, i feel games have moved on since then.)

Art direction.

An art director is a bit like a film director.. but for games, he has to control a team of people to create the art side of a game, he wouldn't have much input on the gameplay and testing side of things but he does have to think about the art style and look of the game, sometimes they would be involved with the writers who provide their input on how they want a game to look.
An art director has to juggle different artists into their roles and start to put the bits together, he would also have to maintain a certain respect from his team.
An art director would have to design a lot of the art himself and distribute it to be made, he would also control some of the outsourcing aspects and meet the artists etc, art directors would have to decide what artists do what, the team he leads isn't a rabble of mindless robots to do his bidding, they would have their own opinions and styles and if something needs changing the art director would have to do it in a non critical way.
An art director is the highest position you can be in the games industry but still be creative, this isn't really a position i want to achieve just yet, I'm not sure what other opportunities there will be so I'm not going to let all my hopes lie within this position, the games industry is always changing who knows what other chances there will be. I'm not sure if I'd last long as an art director anyway as my leadership skills are poor and my time management is.. questionable.. it's like week 10 and I'm doing a week 7 blog..
I'll wait and see what the future holds, as long as i don't get thrown of the course for stealing PC parts.

Gameplay and game design

Many people will tell you that Gameplay is the most important part of a game, there are a few people who go on about "Gud GrafIx" but these day these instances are rare, Gameplay, and game design form the base, or foundation of a game, sound and graphics are placed on top of this.

The old classics (pacman pong etc) are still fun to play today as they have a good game design. The people who designed these games knew how they wanted people to interact with the game environment and what made them fun even though they don't quite have HDR lighting and specular maps.

These fundamentals are still here today, but are sometimes thought of differently, games can be based on a book a film or a story then adapted into gameplay characteristics afterwards.
As technology advances games move forward into different gameplay genres, this became apparent as the first 3 dimensional games where developed, this was more significant when wolfenstein or Doom where made but i suppose battlezone opened the floodgates for the First person shooter genre.















Other Genre's began to find their roots as the first RPG's where developed, also the first Real time strategy games such as Dune where made, this gave something for developers to aim for and be able to put their own story or ideas into a certain game genre.
As money became a more important part of making games publishers kept chucking out hundreds of really bad games with poor gameplay (and/or graphics) just to make cash, games like this are still made by the bucketload today and probably will continue to be made, the only exceptions are when a games designer has an idea or talent to make a good game that is strong on gameplay and style, game producers/writers/designers such as Hideo kojima or Shigeru Miyamoto make these fantastic games as they have a desire or vision to create their game. Not only do they make good games but they end up being popular and earning a lot of money, way beyond the budget used to make it.
These days there seems to be an opening for good games as good games tend to make a lot of money. Third party developers or indie games are also on the rise, as these developers create games because they enjoy them and want to create their idea, much like the old classics like pacman or space invaders. Gameplay innovations are also gaining popularity as developers make all kinds of crazy gizmos and peripherals but more importantly new genres and sub genres.
I use the phrase Sub genres as games are becoming a lot like some films in the way that there hard to define, an example could be Deus X as its a first person shooter but has a lot of RPG elements, System shock 2 is also simular to this as it has its own level system and story driven gameplay. I wouldn't call these games an RPG or an FPS, but perhaps an Action RPG or something like that.
As games develop they will continue to get bigger budgets and better visuals, some games will become a lot like films, single player FPS's usually have a story behind them and as budgets get better so does the writing, even if their are blockbuster games that have superb storylines and mega graphics hopefully the gameplay foundations are still in place, as people won't play a game that isn't fun.

YOU'RE WINNER!!!1

Writing about games.

I haven't bought a games magazine in a long time but i do remember having a short lived subscription to PC gamer from 1998 to 2000, i used to love reading the reviews on games as they not only gave information on how good the game is but did it in an entertaining way, i remember feeling like i knew each of the writers as they all had their own writing styles and feelings on the different aspects of games. I especially liked reading the really bad games as most of the writers basically took the piss in a funny way.
One of the writers during that time was Kieron Gillan i remember him being the butt of most of the staffs jokes and left at some point to do a comic or something. He still does comics and writes blogs, in one blog he mentions how reviewers are overworked and rush to finish up the magazine as these days there's hundreds of games released and the developers want them reviewed. These days their are so many games released that demand attention writers find it hard to give each review the attention it deserves also publishers cutting staff and budget does not help the situation.
When writers are very busy they can't look at every privatly developed game or mod, so the good games do not get any publicity, Kierons blog also suggest how to get your game into the spotlight by doing a bit of the work for them.
Magazines usually have some sort of scoring system that tells readers what to expect from the game, most readers use this a filter and would'nt buy a game less than say 70 percent or 7/10.
The scoring system is a good basis on how good a game is, i admit to skipping the writing just to see what mark it got but reading the review gives a better insight on the game and if its worth your heard earned cash.
I feel that games deserve creative writing and at least some effort and opinion put into a review, reviews should be interesting and not squeezed out of an overworked writer, bad games should be given a good reason of why their bad, reviews can be funny, angry or even excitable as long as they broadcast an opinion and insight.

PR 0.4

Project reality 0.4 has been released and im trying to download it over this internet.. the file is 1.6 gig and even though i cant play it over the internet i may be able to like.. run around as a british soldier and be superior to USMC for a while.
I seriously recommend this mod.. it takes the shoddy arcade monster that EA created and transforms it into a slightly buggy mod that still improves everything.
If you guys get 2142 in the lab then also bundle in BF2 and just .. play this mod instead of the original game like a lot of players already do.

theres also a player guide for folks to read

Oh and the pictures have been working again for a good while, thanks to my host.. who went to America and drank dole juice for 2 weeks.

Dark ages.

We have already done the time warp all the way back to the 50's and all the way up to the 90's so where now?

We're going back.. Back to the future! the year 2000 where we all fly around on hover boards and drive our giant roboto man to work.. well.. not quite.
In my opinion not much drastically changed in the Ps2/Xbox generation apart from souped up graphics. Sega was the first to go down the "next gen" road with the dreamcast and at least tried to change the way we play games by having those crazy VMU memory cards and having a wide array of strange types of games. I enjoyed the small amount of time i had with the dreamcast as every other day a new fantastic game seemed to be released.
The Ps2 didnt have this innovation and just had literally thousands of crap games, (bar a few wich i dislike anyway like final fantasy or whatever) i also hated the low resolution it had and its blurry graphics although it had a nice DVD player addition.. and GTA.
The Xbox had really nice graphics and a few good games, i never played much of this console but i heard good things. The gamecube was another console that had a lot of great games, the graphics were'nt to shabby either but it wasn't very popular and game stores never seemed to have any games for it.
The generation to me seemed less of a "good games and innovation" battle than a "how good can we market these things" fight where the developer with the most shelf space wins. The ps2 won hands down even though it was poorly made and had terrible games (i know some sony fanboy is going to argue against this) seemed to appeal to older and younger players because it was "cool" it was also cheap wich is a bonus too. (i have no idea how their going to shift the ps3 mind.)
Another factor of this generation is the seemingly increasing amount developers are spending on video games, even games without film licenses are becoming very serious investments. This was first apparant to me when shenmue was released and topped 20 million wich was pretty unheard of during that time. This seemed to benifit the market(although the first time this happened it killed the market .cough. ET) as developers spend more and more in making the next blockbuster game despite of possible flops.
Im also supposed to write about the future of where video games will go and wich road they will take, but i fear i'll start writing about how i want them to go not how they actually will or something.. My idea is that game consoles will keep getting better graphics and hardware but will open up to the internet phenomina a bit more and become more "PC-like" i think Mod teams breathe new life into older games and continue their life way past its generation (half-life and mods are played more than most brand new games) mods for console games seems a bit crazy now but who knows what will happen.
Steam seems like the way to go.. (not steam engines you silly) as it is allowing third party games made by individuals to sell their games over the internet. Usually crazy gameplay ideas are too much of a risk for big developers and steam offers these potentially good games to be played.. (Garry's mod is one of them DEFCON is another..) They have also bought the call of duty franchise (*cough lab with HL2 COD and HL1 in easy to use browser thing cough*)
Anyway the Truth is that however the games industry will go its us that has to get used to whatever is given to us and theres not an awful lot we can do, if a company feels like it's in risk it won't try and break the mould too much and it won't go down that road... Business sucks.
On the bright side companies do seem to be opening theirselves up to innovation, Nintendo seems to be doing interesting things with the Wii and a few of the Dx10 PC games look quite good too, i do think that the steam client will get big or another company will use the idea and improve upon it.
Games are taken a lot more seriously now than they used to, these days games are an important part of the entertainment industry and can only really get better.. where we're going we don't need roads

Middle ages

I have already wrote a bit about the middle-ages of video games in my last blog but i'll write more i guess.

The middle ages of video games to me is after the industry got up off its feet (Spacewar through to pong) but before games started to rival the film and music industries wich is about like 5 years ago to now when the Playsation 2 and stuff came out.

After pong, pac man, defender and space invaders were released Atari raked in the cash and decided to develop the first ever home video console that uses plug in cartridges, there were a few home consoles before that had a few games built in but these were expensive and unsuccesfull. Originally they had trouble finding a fast and cheap CPU that could be used to render the current coin-op classics, but then this MOS techno 6502 thing was released wich allowed Atari to push forward the Atari 2600 and make even more money.
The 2600 started to decline and the whole E.T thing happened, atari were already trying to get into the 8-bit home computer thing but the commodore Apple 2 and amstrads controlled the userbase and Atari had to realise there were other company's that could make money off video games.
During this time the NES was released with Mario brothers and Nintendo were now big in the video games industry the NES became dominant in the north american market and were the front runners until Nintendo released the Super famicom in 1989 this console pushed atari out the door and the only real competitor it had was the genesis, wich held on but never was as popular as the nintendo. During this time Arcades started to decline as equal or better graphics could be achieved at home instead of arcades being superior in technology.
The PC engine also had a large enough userbase to survive in the games industry but they were used mostly as tools, the Amiga was still popular in its newer forms.
Hand held video games made there debut and became increasingly popular through the nineties with the Nintendo game boy in pole posistion.
In 1994 Sony released the Sony playstation wich impressed the world with its 3d graphics and quickly dominated the video game market the sega saturn flopped and atari fell apart after the jaguar failed.
After a good while nintendo released its new 64 bit console the N64 wich boasted better graphics and 4 player support although this was popular in japan and sold a lot it didnt beat sony with its playstation as it was expensive and still used cartdridges.
The dreamcast was also released in this time but i feel its more within the PS2/gamecube generation than the playstation/N64 one.

Pirate balloon

As you may of noticed most of the pictures arent working. I have been using an uploader owned by a freind who was nice enough to give me unlimited bandwidth and space however his host has died a bit and wont be fixed for a while.

there is a countdown on the site.

http://www.psychoholiday.com/uploader/

Space invader war tic tac tennis.

During the 1950's kids didn't get to shriek expletives through the internet while gripping their favourite sniper rifle, infact most kids didn't get to play video games at all, Video games seemed pretty exclusive to scientists and Ph.D holders tucked away with their mammoth computers.
The very first electronic game was called OXO wich was basically naughts and crosses made by A.S douglas in 1952 and was only really played within cambridge university.
In 1958 a game called Tennis for Two was made by a man called William Higinbotham, it wasn't really a video game as it was made of an Oscilloscope (one of those machines that monitors sound waves and stuff) To keep people from getting bored at a nuclear power plant.
The coolest computer game at the time was Spacewar made in 1962 by some blokes from MIT wich had two players fighting against one another with small spaceships i feel its one of the most important video games as it opened the doors for later game developers to create the first arcade cabinets and home computers.
I think Pong should be mentioned as it was the first home video console as well as one of the first arcade coin ops.
Space invaders was very important for the popularity of video games and convinced companies and shareholders that computer games could be a very profitable business, along with Asteroids, Pac Man and breakout it seemed computer and video games where here to stay.

And they did.

The first video games i ever played were on the Atari 2600 when i was about 3, the Atari was a little grey box that used small catridges that you seemed to put in backwards, i remember it as a gift for my older brother who was playing the atari version of pac man, i had a go and kept dying so i hated it and went to play with army tanks and eat chomp bars.

Later i attempted it again with another game but the atari had some problem with getting games to work and instead of the title screen you got loud beeps and whines eventually i got a game to play wich was called IKARU WARRIORS.. or something like that where you had crazy music playing and controlled a little army man that could drive tanks and blow up helicopters i thought it was great even though i was crap at it and died all the time. I still have the Atari with most of the old games, it still works and is quite fun to play some Boxing or crystal castles on again.

OH man i found a picture of the cart. Why cant game developers make their cases as exciting as they used to. A Japanese man blowing up American tanks and helicopters looks super awesome to a 4 year old.
The reality doesn't quite look as exciting as the cart promised but i loved this game.










Although i had an atari and was quite contempt with it i didn't realize there where much newer consoles apart from arcade cabinets which i used to enjoy. The next console i had was a Sega Megadrive one christmas wich was to be shared between me and my brother. The first game i played on it was Streets of Rage and it was the best thing ever. I also loved sonic the hedgehog and ended up with all the sequels. i was quite sad when the megadrive died out and these rubbish looking 3d games started taking over, i kept my megadrive until we got our first PC.
We didnt get many ground breaking games on the PC but i still had some pretty cool ones, the one that influenced me the most was Half life and the mods that kept being produced (i also had a dreamcast and a gamecube within this time which i thought where fantastic).
In recent history i haven't bought many games. My PC is quite rubbish and needs a replacement video card although its quite new. Half life 2 and its mods remain a firm favourite of the time, i also enjoy tactical shooters (usually mods for HL2 or BF2) and mapping for source.
I have kept playing computer games all this time as its really been a big part of our lives as much as movies and music as entertainment mediums, although for me i never really watched movies and video games kinda took their place. Plus fragging the kid with the sniper rifle is always fun.

Zombies!

Went home this weekend and bought back my old sega megadrive to play in our kitchen. i didn't bring many games with me but i hope to pick some up for dirt cheap at this store some kid mentioned. I also need a second controller as i lost my other one.

I have another map i decided to post, this is kinda near completion i just need to make the steps to the house better and add a roof to the house. It's for a mod called Zombie panic source. I need to add the zombie panic entities and guns after they release the game, but the base map can be done in HL2 deathmatch.

Its a fun mod and already has a release for HL1 i used to play it quite a lot and after i heard they where making a source conversion i had to make something for it.

heres a general descrition taken from the site.

"The basic idea of the mod is straight out of many different horror films: Zombies are coming for the last remaining humans, and the humans must fight them off as best they can. The way it works is this:

Everyone joins a server, say 10 people. All of the players but one join the Survivors team, which is the humans. The remaining player joins the Zombie team. His goal is to kill all of the humans. The humans' goal, of course, is to stay alive as long as possible. The catch is that everytime a zombie is killed, he simply respawns and continues to play. If a human is killed, he respawns as a Zombie on the Zombie team. Soon, more and more humans have joined the ranks of the zombies, until there is only one human left, facing all of the zombies alone. When the last human dies, the round is over.
That is the gameplay in a nutshell. Of course, there is a little more to it than that.."

My map called zp_surrounded places the humans inside an old wooden house and the zombies attack from the outside. The difference from any other map being the house is fully breakable and zombies soon start pouring in from all over the place, i thought this would make a great map idea. The humans could attempt to barricade the house (support for this is supposed to be in the mod) or do a runner upstairs and hide in the rooms. (breaking the staircase is always a good idea). I had a few problems with the lighting as breakable props act wierd and you can sometimes see the outline of the interior shape.

First map i actually finished.

This map was only finished as i only spent about 5 days working on it. It really does need some errors sorted out like the SDK bug that makes objects fall through displacments, It's a fun little map designed for garry's mod wich lets you build things with the source engine. This map was aimed at building boats and fighting them, i also added bits of wood and other stuff you could use to make your boats better.
Its basically a giant water brush with two parrelel islands and one near the middle. I'm happy to say that it doesn't lag even on low end systems considering the amount of water there is.
It was my first go at a 3d skybox wich is more water added stretching of into the distance, the texture is a little different but i think i'd be able to fix it if i could start steam on this internet and open it.

This is one of the islands. I tried to give the map a sunny feel by making the light brighten the water at a distance.
I also added cool little bunker things you can attack boats from.
Its a pretty basic map but i think it works well and is fun to play.

Stuff

I have like zero 3d max experience but i did a lot of mapping for various source mods.

I dont have a scanner to show you most of the real work for this but i have endless sketches somewhere with details of how i want everything to be. including erm "contingency plans" where like if something ended up out of place or took to much resources to run i could cut a section off and still make it playable. At the moment it looks like a few blocky buildings with textures slapped on but its the most "planned" map i have ever built.
I made a few textures of signposts and things and imported them. Somebody else made the nice normal/specular tile texture for me, although i did provide the reference.
The image quality is a bit rubbish as i just kept saving them all as default Jpegs to save time.










The Cinema is probably the only part of the map that was made after a reference photo that i took myself. It's of a derilict cinema in my town that my dad closed down becasue it had really dodgy electrics. If i find the photo i'll post it up.

Hallo

Testing my new blog where i post stuff about game art and other projects that i will never finish