Ross Rant 01

ice worlds, the last bastion of complete and utter genericism. You would think that someone would have outlawed their use by now, yet still i see them rear their ugly little heads, along with their slack jawed siblings, the fire world, the underwater world and the jungle world. Also lets not forget the space world, which is usually filled with steroid addicted space marines, and aliens with no genitals.

But no, still they appear in game after game, and still they torture me with their generic slip physics, lava planes and chasms. So well done to anyone who manages to come up with the stunning idea of taking an environment that is completely white, completely void of interest points and completely lacking in anything resembling imagination.

Congratulations, you just killed the originality pony.

So next time you're making a game, sat hunched in front of your star wars figurine collection, think about what you're doing, because god is a gamer, god doesn't like genericism, and every time you create a mindless, bland, and utterly boring environment for your games, he kills a kitten. Probably in some lava. With some fireballs shooting out of it. Covered by some sinking blocks. Guarded by aliens with no genitals.


Ross

Team Pwnerer

Its not all SSMB here at Lucid Dreams HQ. Last night we managed to get in a few quick rounds of UT2004 CTF. Was really really cool being int he same room and allowed for team based epicness.

Score Lucid Dreams 1 Cold Sanity 0

Some super awesome sniperage from Ross especially considering he'd never played it before and some solid back up from Col. Holt.... overall was awsome!

So what about today - had a bit of an admin frenzy and tried to stop Ross from going off on one when he discovered A) the presence of an ice world and B) Irish people commenting on our blog. He's already had at the Scots, next up the Irish, then who knows what - hell probably turn on us! Oh god - i can hear him typing now, should any of the other teams be reading this we cant control him.

So design wise came up with a few nice features to make our game more accessible, so now the info arrow highlights NPC's paths and colours them according to starsign. Whats nice is it makes life easier without being completely game breaking.

Deliverables wise - Rich managed to get some nice effects when arrows hit the ground, and looked into source control as well as began putting our first build together. No news at this point but it is one of those things that if you do wrong can have real bad ramifications (hence the need for source control)

Ross continued blocking out the island and adding stuff in as well as place holder textures with the help from Dave. Quite good from a production side of things, got my back log cleared from crazy design meeting week as well as documenting minutes and doing some research into protoplay. So basically the venue, what we need to provide, what we can / cant bring and began fleshing out some nice ideas for the stand.

Also managed to compile a list of all our required 2D assets as well as identifying all the storyboards and narrative stuff me and Dave will have to work on.

Oh and also got ourselves a QA template for when our builds up so we can get some feedback from you guys!

Overall a good end to a pretty mental week. Overall i give it 7 thumbs up !

More monday!

Lucid Dream Team

Saddle Up ! ...

We got Myrrh to harvest ! We were joined by our veteran myrrh harvesting compatriot and DGD alumni Adam (The one who looks a bit like JC). Epic Crystal based Chronicles and caravaning by all (except that pesky Holt boy who made us miss the festival - were only in it for the dance!)

If you can muster the resources is definitely worth it, I'd even go so far as to say best Final Fantasy title ever (please don't lynch me!)

Expect sporadic caravan updates as they happen!

Feeling up Zoe Mode

Its Ross here, and this is my first post. Oh the joy. So yesterday the camera man made his way down to film us, and psychologically abuse us with his camera lens. There is nothing quite like the cold, lifeless stare of a video camera lens to make the average computer geek freeze on the spot or, as in my case, babble like an idiot about Jigglypuff, the Scottish and Praliens.

I was somewhat shocked by last weeks video diaries on the dare site. There were more gimmicks flying around than some giant, gimmick producing machine at the annual gimmick Olympics. In retribution, the London teams are now hard at work producing a 300 man lightsabre battle, complete with cg characters, digital effects, spaceships, a full cinematic soundtrack and a real, talking horse. Oh wait up, we'll just make our games instead, silly me.

So anyway, what else did we do? we had a meeting to discuss the nitty gritty of the game mechanics. 3 hours later we emerged from the room, bloodied, sobbing and clutching various sheets of paper with lots of scribbles on. These scribbles contained the very core of our 'to be developed' content, and are in essence, the dead sea scrolls of Desire FX. . . Or maybe the 10 commandments.

Now that we have the content for the tutorial mission within the game, we know what we have to be focusing on next in preparation for the Alpha build of the game.

We were also lucky enough to have a visit from Ste Curran from Zoe Mode do a presentation about his mum, or more so, her gaming interests and how they relate to the video gaming industry. Mr Curran is an excellent example of why Dare is such an awesome experience, and it was a pleasure to chat to someone who obviously doesn't simply want to produce generic, space marine simulators, but who understands that lapsed and casual gamers represent an opportunity for creativity within the industry, as seen in Zoe Mode's recent Crush on the PSP .

Though i will say that his views on the Library level on Halo made me cry a little inside. Mr Curran, spawning enemies who run right at you with no respite, in a constantly repeating, mirrored environment over and over and over and over again, are not a good design choice. It is tantamount to taking a beautiful, endangered eagle, painting it red, plucking its feathers, dressing it up in Burberry and making it eat its own head.

But i digress, talking to professionals, disagreeing, agreeing and trying to understand the strange world of games is just one part of what Dare and indeed the industry as a whole can offer. LucidDreams eat, sleep and indeed dream games. We discuss them till far to late into the night, we scribble down our mad little ideas (re: Praliens), and we pour our heart and soul into every moment of the time we spend at E.A's beautiful offices.

DO DO, DO DO DOBEEE DOO !

No Blog yesterday as the intertubes were down. General progress continued as well as more design talk. Also started a few design focused doc's as well as building a few (awesome) sound effects and most importantly spoke with Dave and Thomas regarding production and planning.

Ended up missioning into Guildford for Sebs birthday and experiencing the mighty Fahrenheit Cloob. Was really cool to spend some time with other teams and just mission about.

So today we had Ste Curran in, was really cool to get to chat to him since i've followed his blog / show on and off. Hes a pretty funny guy (im almost certain he was "redeye" when he wrote for Edge) and has loads of cool anecdotes - he also seemed to like the concept which was cool :) He gave us a speech on making games more accessible and used his mum as the main focus of the talk. He did make some good points and gave me loads to think about such as the whole Mainstream vs Hardcore debate as well as plug a few other things he was doing.

Linkage

Linkage

So today really has been design meetings all day. After Ste's talk we had a 2 1/2 meeting and were not finished yet so just about to head back in. Camera guy was back as - weve designated Ross team speaker as where the rest of us tend to seize up in front of the camera he just keeps talking and generally venting his spleen. Todays topics! Scotland, and our exciting new title "Praliens!". Genuine hilarity - unfortunately we have no control over the editing process (Northern Ireland i'm looking at you) so is almost certain to get cut. Look forward to our Special FX laden diary epic next week.

Edit. So for some reason I initially put the FF7 victory tune :S

Monday Monday Monday

Been slow but steady today, Rowen has been having a fairly tough time ironing out a few bugs in the prototype he compiled over the weekend.

Basically the island is up and mapped out with a few buildings and place holder textures, where you can select NPC's by clicking, dynamically change their route with our ersatz interest arrow that will take them to a location, and generate a compatibility of anyone they meet on the way. The only problem is that when you try to initiate courting the targets realign accept the man runs slower than the woman, and for all intents and purposes looks like hes chasing her round the island :) pretty funny stuff, might have to keep it in as an incompatibility "feature".

Other prototype wise Rich has got Nudge arrows working on NPC's and all the arrow and flying and Camera stuff from last week (using a cunning way around physicalising NPC's). For our A section were gunna focus on FPS view for arrows and making it a stationary view both for flying and on foot. For some reason I break it every time i touch it but theres some neat touches like when you hit him he flies through the air and lands with a little stumble animation, its also variable power so you can really cane it. Also you can stack the power by shooting them in midair, which I think is a neat touch. Build-wise it would be awesome to get something uploaded this week - I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be possible, just really a case of doing it when its becomes beneficial as opposed to scripting something that will just get changed / wasted ^^

Other stuff ... Dave put some textures together - real nice stuff, I thought he'd taken the path one from the texture packs we have access too ^^, also Ross has been busily turning out buildings - probably get a more in depth art update soon. Having spent today trying to optimise the road we made Ross do a billion times due to our indecision I can see why, its really hard!

Also we had a design meeting with the guys from EA and they gave me some handy feedback from their point of view. Its col to see that they are always thinking of the end users experience, something i think especially gamers, forget when they are coming up with ideas. Alot of it we had covered but just need to really hammer the details out. Such as visual feedback on Info arrows etc. Again this is something that will come through play testing, what works, what doesn't etc so yeah hopefully get it uploaded ASAP. Currently putting together a kind of Ideal first 10 minutes. Since the general publics going to be judging the first round we want to make sure its not too exclusive, but at the same time too easy etc so were going to be after some monster feedback!

Anyways thats mostly it for today- Tonite epic Myhrr hunting!

The blog changes its colours

Hello ladies and gentlemen,

Considering our main character has changed its looks, we decided to give the blog a new look and feel. I have this feeling that the blog will change its colours frequently as our production continues, but at the same time I feel that change is good and it keeps this blog interesting. :)


Aside from that we have managed to finally set up our lovely mood board that I am very, very proud of. Aidan helped me cut half of all of these pictures once they got printed out and so with our forces combined we made this lovely mood board come to life. Go on and have a look. Click on the image to enlarge it and see all the lovely details.

Look at how proudly I am standing next to our lovely mood board. Yes, I love it and so do my team mates. So this is it... Caribbean setting, contemporary time, lots of sun, lots of water and a lovely happy island to walk around in.

Next thing on the to do list is texturing... I will do getting my hands dirty on that one next. Considering we are trying to get a nice first build up and running soon, I guess it's time to speed things up and get some productive images ready. So I'm putting my Paladin gear on and sharping my Wacom sword at the minute and I guess I'll speak to all of you after my next quest has been completed...