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Tag Archive for Videogames

Uncanny Environments

March 16, 2015 Videogames, Writing Comments Off on Uncanny Environments

 

I think Dying Light has nailed the urban environment.  It’s been coming for a while, every iteration, every game that comes out that has been set in an analog for a real world space has been taking baby-steps forward.  Watch Dogs nearly got it, the Modern Warfare games were as close as I’d ever seen up until that point, Max Payne had a toe over the line, but I think in Dying Light we finally have a believable urban environment to play with.

Why do I say this?  Because of all the *stuff*.

For long time (decades, really), if there was an object in your environment, it was useful.  Barrels?  You could blow those up.  Boxes?  Smash’em to get stuff.  But not any longer, in fact, the fact that “useful” objects are tagged with some kind of glow effect, or show up as actionable in your HUD is, in part, due to the fact that there is so much stuff in the world that you can’t find what you need unless we point your eyeballs at it.

In order to get an environment to look “real” it has to be dirty.  This is a problem that artists have beat their heads against over and over.  One of the things that made the model effects in Star Wars look so real?  The dirt, the grime, the grit in-between joints. Ever try to get “realistic textures” from in-service military vehicles?  Good luck, they keep those things *so* clean that, even though you are working from a photo of an actual tank, nobody ever believes it.

It’s the uncanny valley of environments, and I think we’ve finally climbed out.

 

No Free Lunch…

February 28, 2015 Writing Comments Off on No Free Lunch…

Image courtesy: http://www.polygon.com/2015/2/25/8102751/exploding-kittens-kickstarter-rich

I’ll admit it, I backed the Exploding Kittens Kickstarter.  I have a particular weakness for clever, and Matthew Inman (author of The Oatmeal) manages to slather any project he’s involved with (even tangentially) with a tasty clever-sauce that puts even Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ to shame.

And, like everybody else in gaming, watching the Kickstarter blow past it’s original goal into OMFG!?! territory is a special kind of hell.  Because we know. For a while now, in videogames, one of the first questions you get asked when pitching is “Well, why didn’t you do a Kickstarter?”  It’s the new death knell for any pitch.  Its the producer’s subtle way of telling you that if you don’t have the Rockstars on your team to pull off a million dollar Kickstarter campaign, then you’re pretty much dead in the water.

But Kickstarter is a problematic platform for games.  It’s easy to over-promise. There are more than a few Kickstarters out there that have collected their money and have quietly gone under because the people starting them (despite their assurances to the contrary) did not know enough about what they were doing.  H*ll, even people with decades of experience (witness Double Fine) can face the end of a successful Kickstarter with a pocketfull of promises that they will go into debt delivering on.

From a mobile game designers perspective, this is a MASSIVE number of players.  In fact, this is the kind of win you can build an entire development studio on the back of, so you can see why a producer might want to know if you can pull off this kind of Kickstarter.

Of course, it doesn’t occur to them (or maybe it does and they’re just trying to get rid of you) that if you did pull off the million dollar Kickstarter, you wouldn’t need them in the first place.  Their opportunity to cash in would be a lost one.

 

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