An update on what I’m currently working on for the GDW game. There has been some progress on the particle engine. The engine currently compiles and seems like it works...until you start firing the bullets. The problem with it right now is that a circle (the bullet) is drawn and it just flashes on and off once per click. Hopefully this will be solved by next week. Besides the particle engine, the requirements for the game pitch has also been defined and worked out and are now part of the commitment/development plan to be submitted for milestone 1. Here's a short video that shows whats happening right now:
One game I’ve played this week was ‘The Endless Tower’ (http://www.addictinggames.com/endless-tower-game.html) This game isn’t too bad once you figure out all the mini games. Figuring them out might be a bit of a challenge since the game does not provide any useful instructions. The ones given in game for the mini game are brief and sometimes force you to figure it out. To make it worse, each level is timed, which means you probably won’t get enough time to figure it out AND do what you’re supposed to do. The music does not really have ups or downs and feels like it’s kind of “just there”, although it does get old since it never changes and the pace also stays the same throughout the entire game. To sum it up, Endless Tower seems like a “rushed” clone of Nintendo’s Wario Ware. The game could be a lot better if there were more sounds and varieties in the mini games.
First post in my first blog! I'm going to skip the intro crap and jump right into what I have to do for this weekly blog post.
So, what new game did I play today? It's an iPhone app I got off the app store for free titled Thum vs Thum. I guess a simple description for the game could be “e-thumb wrestling”. I find it unique since it's the first of its kind that I've played. At first, I was pretty excited about playing the game since the the title screen suggested I could be in for some intense thumb action. The instructions were also easy to go through and there was no need to go through an entire essay just to learn about all the features the game has or what each menu/control does.
Title Screen / Main Menu
Once I started playing and launching thumb missiles, the first thing I noticed was how hard it was to keep track of things @_@. When the missiles are ready to launch you MUST launch them within 1 or 2 seconds otherwise you lose it (or worse, if you launch it late / prematurely you damage yourself o_O). On top of having to keep track of which missiles to launch for each thumb, the missiles themselves add to the confusion since they move around and get the attention of your eyes. Once I finished my first game, the next thing I noticed was how the music SUCKS. There's only 1 song that plays over and over again non-stop so the only other option I had was to mute the game. Going into my second game and taking more notes on the music/sounds, I noticed how the music is barely audible once you have missiles flying across the screen. Missile launch/explosion sounds are all you hear. The only “essential” decision that has to be made in this game is which tower/button to hit. As mentioned before, if you launch your missile prematurely or late, you damage that tower. After going through the instructions a second time, one thing I found that added to the games uniqueness was the fact that it could be for single or 2 players (each player takes one side). Overall, it was fun to play for 10 minutes although the game does start to lose its appeal after about 5 minutes so I wouldn't really recommend spending your entire bus ride to home/school playing this.
Gameplay
Result of my first game
The final result
Onto question #2, the FUN game I chose is Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. I was playing this just a few hours ago so there are lots of things I can comment on. I'm going to use some of the categories listed on Wikipedia under Game Mechanics as a guide for writing the following section. The idea of a “turn” exists in places such as health recovery and income per 20 minutes. The idea of “capture/eliminate” exists with the idea of having to burn down Borgia towers to regain that piece of land. “Movement” in the game is fairly free so long as the player doesn't go out of bounds. The player can pretty much roam to wherever they want and can even jump off of buildings (with consequence if there is nothing to catch the fall). “Resource management” exists in managing where the money is spent (rebuilding certain places / buying armour etc.) and also with managing the assassin's (standby or out on missions gaining experience). Finally, “risk reward” exists in the missions that the player can send other assassin's on. The harder the mission, the more experience but the higher chance of death. In my opinion, these work together pretty well and helps shape the experience since the player is not over-constrained by rules to the point where there is no fun and at the same time is not under-constrained to the point where there's way too many pointless things to be done. The game sound is also nice since it plays the appropriate sounds depending on what the player is doing. For example, there's music that “rushes” you when you're being timed, random singers that come up to you in the streets and annoy you, etc. One complaint I do have is with the occasional chipping sound you'll hear. A quick Google search reveals that it's actually a bird, although it sounds more like my disc being scratched up :O. The flow is nice and smooth although some may say it's a bit rushed. The player gets the bare basics of the story by playing the game and skipping a lot of the crap but if they dug deeper the story can actually get really complex. I find this to be a good mix that satisfies both newbies to the series and hardcore fans of the series. The interface is fairly similar to previous titles, and has a nice futuristic feel to it which fits perfectly since it provides that needed link to close the gap between the “real” world and the “simulated” world. The level design was great since the player wasn't going through “levels” anymore. It was just one big level/world and the player is free to choose what to do. The story is has a level of uniqueness to it since it's able to take historic and futuristic events and has twists added to it here and there. I do have to complain about the writing here though. The story is WAY too complex and even though I've played through all 3 games in the series the story seems to get more and more complex with “gaps” that are never really filled to my satisfaction. The AI was fairly challenging, which I enjoyed. The most challenging part of the game was killing all of the Borgia captains, and I want to point out here that the guy that hides underground PISSES me off T_T. The cheater hides like 500 levels underground and is quick to flee. Running after him is useless since there are always guards that pop out and block your path. It took me what felt like 1000 tries before I finally killed the guy. Overall, I think the game was GREAT and for those that have played the entire series, you will have seen that Ubisoft has gone a long way and has removed a lot of the un-fun stuff since the original Assassin's Creed (example: the repetition in missions and the EXTREMELY annoying beggars).
Here's a little video on gameplay video presented by Ubisoft at E3 2010:
Time now for #3, a game that I think is un-fun. For this part, I chose Onimusha: Warlords for the PlayStation 2. Despite the high ratings, I personally thought the game was terrible in many areas. To start off, the user interface is fairly plain, and shares many similarities with Resident Evil. Character movement was also poorly executed. When turning or moving backwards the character is actually sliding, this makes it seem unrealistic and reminds me of my 1st year second semester game. The camera system in my opinion was the worst. Each “area” was small and every time the player moved into a new area the camera would be in a different position and gets you disoriented. The enemies were also poorly thought out. I've only played the first 10 minutes and the 2 types of enemies I ran into were: skeleton samurai and ninjas with what seemed like night vision goggles (in broad daylight?). The “boss” that I didn't get a chance to fight was some monster that looked like it came out of Resident Evil. On top of that, I found that the idea of collecting coloured orbs (souls) was a bit unbelievable. The storyline was interesting enough so I didn't skip through anything. The music was also great and was a good fit for the theme of the game. The graphics were also fairly decent considering it was released in March 2001 and was actually moved to PlayStation 2 halfway through development (it was originally supposed to be for PlayStation 1). To conclude, I have to say that the scores for this game on various sites (8.4 on gamespot / 8.9 on IGN) is a bit too high. I would have given the game 7.5 tops.
Here's a gameplay video for the game:
Finally, I'm going to finish off this very long post with an update on what I'm doing for the GDW game. To start off, my old group has merged with another group and we are now called Got Rice?. I'm currently working on a particle engine for the game and I'm hoping to have it done by next week. It always seems so easy until you start working on it but fortunately everything starts to make sense once you settle down and start working hard at it.
Now.......gotta go figure out how that damn hash tag works in twitter... ###
