Now is a great time to show your support for the abolition of software patents throughout the world by signing the Stop Software Patents petition!
David Hellman, the talented artist many of you know from his recent work on Braid, was in town recently for the Penny Arcade Expo. Since neither he nor I had ever been on the Seattle Underground Tour, we decided to make a day of it.
While waiting for the tour to begin, we began talking about some game design particulars, specifically with regards to The Legend of Zelda and Shadow of the Colossus. We were both in immediate agreement that the Zelda series had gotten consistently worse with each iteration, and furthermore we agreed on the reason: it continued to become more of a forced sequence of events, and less of an exciting exploration of a magical place (David also recently wrote about this problem in the latest DS incarnation). We continued to discuss the finer points of this until the tour began.
Almost as if it had been scripted, the tour managed to serve as a near perfect example of everything we had just said. The overbearing tour guide, who was fanatic in her refusal to let anyone say anything or ask any questions during the tour (lest it derail her carefully practiced banter), forced us through the series of underground passageways stopping exclusively at "sequence points" along the way, where she gave a rehearsed speech. All around us were interesting items - abandon machinery, passageways that led off into unknown places, old electrical wiring, etc. But none of these things were accessible, and even when David and I asked about one or two of them, the tour guide actively dismissed our questions because apparently they were not part of the tour.
It was incredibly frustrating. Which coincidentally, is exactly how we feel when we try to play modern Zelda games.
So until Zelda games return to their explorational roots, or the Underground Tour gets some guides who actually care about their visitors' curiosity, we will have to make due with the limited experiences that we are given. Included below are a series of shots from David's iPhone, which capture some of the things about which we would have liked to learn, but were never given the opportunity.
This is my first time ever working with printed t-shirts, so I was very nervous, but I'm delighted to say that everything worked out quite well!
I wanted to have a special t-shirt to give away at PAX to commemorate the event, since I was so happy that Sushi was selected and I wanted to have something really cool that only PAX attendees could get. Unfortunately there's 50,000 people who go to PAX, and so I think it would have cost... hmm... over a half million dollars to print that many t-shirts? So shirts will only be going to folks who beat the conference best, daily best, or hourly best versus score for each of the versus stage rounds!
Of course, I might also give out a few at my own discretion :)
Jon linked to and expanded on our advertising-in-games rant on his excellent blog over at braid-game.com. There's some good discussion going on over there in the comments, as well as the clip of David Lynch alluded to by Jeff in the podcast. Check it out!
One of the nice things about my custom rendering distribution system is that it saves all of the images that have been rendered. This allows me to easily go back through time and collect all of the renderings of a character during the various stages of development. I thought it might be interesting to post one such series for people who aren't familiar with the kind of process I use for getting the "look" of the characters in Sushi Bar Samurai.
I've posted them in chronological order, which may seem counter-intuitive because you will have to go back to earlier items to "start at the beginning"... but, I thought it would be best to do it this way so that the actual timestamps on the images go in the order in which they were actually rendered. Plus, it gives me some incentive to add a button in Nebula for switching the sort order :)
Mind you, I only just watched this video today, and randomly at that (it was linked off of the anti-patent video I posted about previously). Yet all the things this guy talks about are things I did in Nebula. I guess I'll have to watch and see if his stuff progresses, and maybe I won't have to do as much work :) However, based on how bad all the web stuff is that I've experienced so far, I suppose I'm not too worried about the work being for naught! Also there are a good many things I'm doing that weren't mentioned in the video, but that could just be because of the video's limited scope.
Google Video has posted an excellent lecture by Daniel Ravicher that I highly recommend watching. It's a patent lawyers view of why the patent system is not working towards the public good, and includes many trenchant observations. I was unaware that his organization existed, but I will definitely be looking into it and seeing if it's something to which I can donate.
A look back at a dark time in the history of this podcast, Microsoft thwarts Jeff's attempts to buy Braid, one of Casey's night walks has a porn movie twist with a surprise ending, and everyone screams at the top of their lungs when it comes time to discuss the current state of web development.
It's just not that hard.
I was finishing Sushina's chef's coat yesterday, and so I mildly sculpted a high-res version of the coat in Mudbox because I find that some subtle detail helps to make it feel more like cloth (I tend not to do too much high-res sculpting for the characters in this game, because they are supposed to have more of a clean surreal look, and I have found that putting too much detail into the faces and such breaks that look). But of course I can't just use the high-res mesh, because 3DS MAX will roll over and die in multiple ways (way too slow, and way too impractical to assign the skin weights, completely ridiculous animation update times, etc.) So what I prefer to do is bake a displacement map from the high-res sculpt, and then use that.
But here's the thing: baking never seems to work. I'm constantly having problems with it. God for bid you have even a slight problem with your UVs - Mudbox et al will just lose their shit immediately if that happens. But assuming you do have good UVs, and everything's fine, still Mudbox seems to just have magical problems sometimes and you can't get a bake out of it (I've attached the image you get out of Mudbox if you try to bake the coat as a displacement map).
OK, no big deal, Mudbox didn't work. I'll just export the high-res map to MAX, and let that bake it with Render to Texture, right? Wrong. Even worse result there.
But then I thought, hey wait... I've written this code before! It's in Granny. So I dropped the old Granny plug-in into MAX, and used that to cast. What a surprise! Perfect map (attached).
What is the big deal here? I really don't understand. I mean, I feel like I did a good job on the texture baking tools in Granny, and I definitely think they're better than anything else I've seen. But I was thinking that was true about the quality of the maps produced, and the flexibility. Not about the fact that it works at all. I just don't know how you produce a tool like this that just plain doesn't work. It's not that hard of a problem. Getting the quality good is tricky, getting the speed up is an interesting problem, making it really flexible maybe... but just making it output a map that could vaguely be considered correct? How hard is that??
The past three weeks have been a particularly grueling endeavor, having been stranded in LAMP land whilst putting together the new website. Overall I think things came out OK, but I was surprised at exactly how bad the development environment is for LAMP projects. PHP is almost entirely unusable, and the combination of PHP and MySQL and the way in which they interface is both comically bad and tragically slow. Had I known how bad it was, I probably would have rolled everything in C, but I foolishly thought it must all be good because it's so common, and it would "save me time". It did quite the opposite.
But thankfully everything seems to be working reasonably well now, and after PAX I plan to turn on the user-editing features of things so I can merge the forums into the site proper, and allow people to maintain their own areas of the page as well, which I think will be a great thing for a lot of the stuff that's currently being hosted through PHPBB on the forums. So, we'll see how all that goes.
Now it's time to focus my attention back on art, as there is a bunch of art that I'd like to have done for PAX, since I am allowed to show a later build than the one that was submitted for the initial judging. In theory, it is now pretty easy for me to post screenshots to the website, too, so hopefully as I work on the art I'll be able to put up images of interest along with the project notes.
There are "three plus n" characters in the game, where the three refers to the number of non-spirit characters, and the n refers to the many spirits found floating throughout the land. Today I started the finishing work on the third of the three characters, and throughout the weekend I plan on going through and rendering out many more frames of animation for all of them, since right now I feel like the game is lacking a lot of the action sprites necessary to convey what is happening in some of the introductory places. So I feel like that's a big priority for the PAX showing.
