the long and short of it

Mass Effect (done)

okay - I’ve finished the third and last title of the series … and now I can totally relate to the anger, confusion and dissatisfaction of the fans concerning the ending: it’s unbelievably bad!

such a great series, such a potential, such well written characters and (apart from the ending) such a great story … and everything ruined, all of it, within the last 15 minutes of the dozens of hours I’ve played it

how the hell could the same writers who invented those story twists and characters come up with this garbage ?

the ‘last choice’ isn’t a choice at all and the ending is totally unacceptable - no matter how it turns out to be. it really destroys the whole great concept of having real consequences during such a long series and story … nothing matters in the end

I had powerful emotions on the ending of the first game, even more on the unbelievably great showdown of the second game - and the only thing I felt now is pure dissatisfaction

when I saw garrus and edi’s body, lying in front of the citadel beam
when I had to choose between saving kaidan or ashley
when I convinced wrex not to make a huge mistake
when legion and thane were killed on the collectors base
when I saw legion again - although not as himself
when I had to choose between genocide of the quarians or the geth
when tali was afraid, and thanked me
when seran thanked me for convincing him
when I made the leap of faith towards the shuttle on the collectors base
when thane found his son
when mordin died with his last smile on his face 
when joker and edi developed a relationship
…
such many moments - such many so powerful moments - and such a crap ending on top of it

I know Bioware is releasing a “redemption” for it - but the damage is done already - they robbed me of the ending the series deserved

Diablo III is calling me

so far I managed to not-play diablo … mainly because I don’t have the money to buy it (not entirely true) and because I surely don’t want to play it ‘pro’ (meaning beating inferno and stuff) since that would be rather time consuming, and I’d like to still get good grades at uni and have a girlfriend - no, thanks blizzard

however - I’ve informed myself about most details now and watched multiple reviews and videos as well as was able to play it a bit yesterday and I have to admit, it’s a fine game. I really want to play it now

I’ve talked with some friends about it (who all play the game) and it’s rather great that the game takes the “mmorpg” approach at leveling, meaning that the real ‘fun’ only starts after max-leveling your char - other than diablo 2 which system I hated, since leveling a char up to lvl 100 was more or less a dead end and also unbelievably time-consuming

so I could level up one or two chars quite easily without having to sacrifice half my life - and still don’t miss (too much) since I could simply take a “casual” approach on inferno (yeah, if you were in a decent raid-guild in wow like me, you’re officially allowed to hate me for saying this)

even better: my girlfriend seems to be interested in diablo 3 too - actually it’s the perfect game for her (she doesn’t like mmo’s too much because of the fact that one eventually needs to play in groups)

… I’ve written all this stuff now, just to find a reason for not playing it but honestly, there isn’t one

Mass Effect Trilogy

everyone and his mother is playing diablo 3 at the moment … well, I’m not

I’m finally playing the Mass Effect games (never touched them up until this point) and I have to say … wow, what a great series

I just finished the first game and am installing the second one right now

(btw. the ending was unbelievably epic)

the ludum dare results are finally there !

I think my game didn’t score too bad considering it being my very first ludum dare entry, having only 12h to work on it and over 1400 games overall - let’s take a look at the individual categories:

Coolness: nothing new here - I’m 100% cool and have earned myself a gold medal, hell yeah!
Mood: that’s the category I was aiming for, and being 6th out of 1402 is quite amazing, it’s a bit sad I didn’t make it in the top5 though. sound would have surely put me at least third ‘sadface’
Theme: 51th doesn’t sound so amazing - but - every game in the competition tried to score on this category so it’s really amazing being 51th: I’m better than 96.36% of the entries!
Graphics: I’m also very impressed by this - there were so many good looking games that I didn’t think of scoring something better than 300
Overall: same here
Innovation: this on the other hand is a bit frustrating since I don’t think there were this many innovative compo games this time.
Fun: well - my game isn’t too much of a game
Humor: wait … I scored better in humor than ~60% of the games? with a horror game? did I miss something?
Audio: however, this is the real mystery. my game has no sound at all - how could anybody rate anything besides n/a?

0x10c

I spend the last few hours learning stuff about it and it seems this thing is something truly new. I like the concept, setting and mechanics of having your own ship you can truly control, upgrade and update(!) on your own - if he (notch) can make it right , that is.

it has huge potential to fail miserably. unlike minecraft this game isn’t playable by everyone. it’s exactly the other way around - it’s almost exclusive for coders. at least it’s true fun and potential can only be experienced by coders.

I’ve read through the DCPU-16 documentation and it’s really similar to redcode, which is an assembler language used for the game core wars (that I played some years ago). that being said - it’s still quite hard to grasp (for me) and I fear that even most coders won’t be able to jump into this game without spending some days learning assembler (all over again, probably)

normal folks don’t even have a chance. If it would use something like Python, Lua or good’ol’ basic it would be hard enough for non-coders, but assembler is like a wrecking ball right into your face.

I’m sure he will come up with something for this - maybe programs on discs or tapes or whatever - that the player can find and import/use without needing to code anything. but I fear the remaining game isn’t that good for this to be enough.

having my own ship and programming it to fly around the stars, picking up loot, calculating routes and communicating with other ships - all because I coded it - that’s an experience that I crave for.

the normal gamer though would feel like in a facebook game - just clicking some buttons and checking back later for the results, without embracing the real essence of it - and that’s what can and possibly will break this game.

however - having a mmo type game just for “us” is a great concept never the less. I’d just like the coding language to be less abstract.

follow up edit:

ok - I just found out a bit more about the state of the art here … and it seems I totally misjudged the amount of RAM and ROM available.

since the floppies will actually hold 1.44 MB it will be possible to write quite complex code

also some compilers already exist - making it possible to compile “higher” languages, like BASIC, for the DCPU, like this: https://github.com/M4v3R/DCPU-Bas/blob/master/sample/frame.bas

man, I’m getting hyped!

the DCPU will start with 100Khz but seems to be upgradable. I’ve read about all the plans guys are having for this game - like p2p networks and cyberwars … omg

Post-Mortem LD#23 /compo/

I’m reblogging myself from here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/orni/

Play Asylum

what went right:

• I did use the tools I know – so my workflow was quite good and I could jump into the action right away
• reading through the Flashpunk documentation before LD started turned out to be a quite good idea. I learned of some function I didn’t knew exist – and although I didn’t use this specific one’s – reading the documentation of your engine is never a bad idea
• this old-school 8bit style graphics are very easy for me to produce and many people like my stuff – so I assume I’m good at it. it’s a good idea to stick to what you’re good with for LD
• I took some time to think about the theme and develop a pretty good concept in my head which I played through “with my mind” several dozen times. prototyping with your mind is something that people should invest more time for

what went wrong:

• time management … oh boy did I screw up.
  initially I thought I’d have the whole 48 hours but suddenly stuff happened and I even ended up abandoning my LD entry completely at one point. it was only several hours before the deadline that I got time to continue working and had to code in lightning-fast mode. the complete development only took about 12 hours.
  because of this I also had to cancel several features and make my game a lot shorter than I initially planned
• I didn’t do any sound … mainly because I didn’t have the time. but also because I’m quite inexperienced with audio so I figured to finish everything else first.
  as the development progressed it turned out sound is very much needed in this game and it could get literally 10 times better with some good audio – so I recorded some effects but sadly didn’t have the time to implement them
• the beginning of the game is much much too long. everybody who played it in the context of LD told me so. and that’s exactly the point. I playtested it only on it’s own and didn’t realize that most people would play it in a series of LD entries, so my game would start quite lame in comparison. this is a lesson learned – always account for the fact that your game is going to be played in a series of games.

what didn’t make it in the game:

the main level was planed much much bigger. I planed platformer elements (canons, enemies, moving platforms, portals…) that should make it more of a game. during playing this the background story would have been unfold and the player would have learned how the character ended up in the asylum and a bit more about what the monster represents. I also tried to use a bit of psychology for this – the hanging chains, the long fall and the shrinking room are all symbols for his story.

the game would be much better and much more disturbing as well as thought-provoking if I had the full 48h instead just a quarter of it – it also would feature sound

what my conclusion is:

I’m happy I didn’t abandon the project and finished what I could. all in all I’m quite proud – I don’t think it’s to shabby and it’s my first LD after all.
however – for my next LD I’m definitely going to make sure to no be kept away from working on my entry.