I fufilled a childhood dream of sorts today by attending E3 for the first time. The show is absolutely huge. Maybe I’m sort of numb to the industry now after doing two GDCs, but E3 just seemed like an amusement park of games. That said, I got to play a lot of games that won’t be playing again until the end of the year. General impressions:

THE GOOD

Brutal Legend
Played the PS3 version and loved every second of it. The combat isn’t the best (reminds me of Ratchet & Clank’s wrench), but the driving was absolutely awesome. Voice acting was solid, animation and graphics were beautiful minus a little bit of a framerate issue (which I fully trust DoubleFine to fix before it ships). I laughed out loud more than twenty times in the course of a ten minute demo. The game screams character, and I’ll be picking it up on day one.

Bayonetta
Looks better than any Devil May Cry game ever did. Honestly, I thought it was more fun than God of War III. The sexual innuendo in the game is funny but possibly a bit too much - the overlimit/fatality mechanism in the boss fight was called “climax” and involves the lead character’s clothes flying off of her and eating the monster. It didn’t make any sense, it’s extremely Japanese, but the game as a whole looks like a complete package.

Left4Dead 2
It’s like Left4Dead, only with cooler characters, brighter graphics, and more gameplay variation. It’s awesome, and it was different enough from the first to warrant a new retail release.

Project Cube (Working Title)
Square-Enix’s under-the-radar XBLA game is a lot like Geometry Wars in that it’s a twin stick shooter, but the comparisons end there. There are some really cool gameplay mechanics like dashing into enemies and confusing them and using shields to collect enemy fire and returning it with a counterattack. Violent, but elegant graphical style too. If this drops at $10, consider me sold.

THE BAD

The Conduit
For all the hype surrounding it as the definitive FPS on Wii, it’s really just a clunky shooter. I saw that IGN nominated for “best of show,” which is complete and total bullshit. There wasn’t even a line to play it at the Sega booth (rare for any game at the show). The controls are nowhere near as good as Metroid Prime 3’s in practice, the graphics look beautiful in some places and awful in others (textures are awesome, 3D models are atrocious). The gunplay wasn’t particularly fun or intreguing, and I felt like I was struggling to make the Wii do what I wanted it to do. If you want to play a good FPS on Wii, wait for the Metroid Prime Trilogy to come out this fall. I’m not saying this is the worst game I’ve ever played, but no part of it was better than average and many parts were worse. I’d be shocked if this gets a Metacritic score over 75%, but

Red Steel 2
I was cautiously optimistic about this game even though the first one sucked. I went up to the booth, and the Ubisoft rep gives me his pitch. “With Wii MotionPlus, you can control a sword with 1:1 precision.” I waved the sword around, and sure enough, it was moving almost exactly like the remote in my hand. I swung it around a few times and it was sort of replicated on the screen. I then made a stabbing motion forward, and nothing happened. I tried it again, and still nothing happened. There were a few people watching me play, and the Ubisoft rep said “you have to swing it around, make slicing motions.” So in other words, the game offers unparalleled swordplay providing you only use your sword in the small set of ways the developers intend you to. Right.

Sonic & Sega Superstars Racing
The load times in the E3 demo were worse than Sonic ‘06. That means something to Sonic fans. The game itself stuttered with a terrible framerate and was about half the speed of Mario Kart Wii. There’s also a really annoying duo of commentators who talk about the race while you play. It’s like Ocarina of Time’s Navi on steroids, except without any sort of gameplay functionality or purpose. This is a game that will look beautiful in screenshots, though, as the tracks were pretty and fairly well-designed.

THE AVERAGE

Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time
Imagine all the fun of Ratchet & Clank Future, and take away all the character from it. That’s the impression I got from the E3 demo. Clank was nowhere to be found, and all of his abilities had been replaced new gadgets for Ratchet. Replacing him with a bunch of tools destroys the bond between the characters, and I hope Insomniac doesn’t keep it up for more than a level or two.

Dead Space: Extraction
Very cool rail shooter, but it’s a rail shooter and therefore limited for playability. Graphics look good for Wii but will be disappointing to anyone who played the original. I basically just told you everything you can figure out from the gameplay videos, which is all I got out of playing it.

I’ve started work, I’m settled in, and I’m finally adjusted to the pacific time. Working at EALA is awesome, and if the rest of the summer is anything like the previous week, I’d love to come back in the future. Unfortunately, given the nature of the work, I can’t talk about what I’m doing because it’s an unannounced project. So instead I’ll talk about the rest of LA.

“In no known language exists the phrase ‘beautiful like an airport.’”

I’m sitting at gate B9 in Jacksonville waiting for my flight to take off to DC. United tried to convince me to change to a later flight three times at check in, so they must really want me to take a different airline. Like many airlines, they overbook every flight to maximize profit. I don’t really care what airline I fly as long as my bags make it to LA.

Weather in Jacksonville has been less than desirable over the past week. Six days in a row of rain, with more rain in the forecast every day for the next ten days. The forecast for LA for the next ten days has partly cloudy skies with highs in the low 70’s and lows in the high 50’s. Providing United doesn’t delay my flight (lol) I should be getting to my new apartment in about 9 hours.

I’ve wanted to write a proper postmortem for Audiball for some time now and I’ve been putting it off for far too long. Below, I try to summarize six months of my life into a few pages of text. Audiball was not a commerical success, nor was it groundbreaking in any way, but it was my experience with game development and I’ll always be proud of it. Read on if you’re interested in the game’s original vision, what sacrifices were made, what unexpected events changed development, how the game’s soundtrack was composed, how you can learn from my mistakes, and how an announcement trailer can be the longest fifty seconds of your life.

Haven’t made a proper update here since before GDC (which was awesome, by the way). I thought I’d write a bit about what I’m doing right now and what I’m doing this summer.

Here’s another composition I made about a year ago for a music class at Tech. I was still learning Reason at the time, but it’s better than the last one I posted. The time I spent on projects in this class laid the foundation for Audiball’s soundtrack, which I’ll also post at a later date. Of course, Audiball’s soundtrack was based around procedural generation, so releasing it as static files is a little harder than it is with these.

Download (3.17 MB)

You know that whole thing where people have a bad experience with a company, and they post on their blogs hoping enough people read it for the company to do something about it? Yeah, I’m gonna try that.

After finishing up my XNA game, I wanted to play around with iPhone development. To do this, I needed an iPhone, and since it was close to Christmas at the time, I figured it was as good a time as any to pick one up. Below is the story of my unsuccessful attempt at purchasing an iPhone from AT&T that started in December and is still causing me headaches to this day.

The current record for snowfall in Atlanta is about 4.2 inches, recorded in the fabled storm of 1993. Some parts of Atlanta have well over 5 inches of accumulation (Centennial Olympic Park, for example), and others are around 2. The fact remains that it has indeed snowed in the south, and therefore everyone should run around and scream like crazy people until it melts away so that we can return to our normal lives. In other news, I spotted this by the World of Coke while walking through the “thundersnow” storm, which pretty much says it all:

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Here are some more random designs I made last year. The events they were made for have come and gone, but hey, it can’t hurt to put them on the blog, right?

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For a Woot.com design derby themed “Words As Art”

It’s one of those “half-full, half-empty” things, you know?  I’m getting into the full swing of the next project from Indiecisive Games. We’re still waiting for Audiball’s sales results, but it’s never too early to act on a good idea. I’m excited about working on a new game. On the other hand, I’ve enjoyed being able to relax, catch up on sleep, and have a social life over the past two months and the nature of the job means I have to give some of that up (most likely the unimportant stuff like sleep).