The Doglion

So the Kinect is coming soon, and game designers are now tasked with the challenge of finding new innovative game ideas and designs that work with the Kinect. Not just work with it, but that are now possible (meaning that they had been impossible before). Obvious game types that lent themselves for motion controls in the past are dance games, for example. On a standard controller not much more than rhythmic button pressing, but with some way of capturing actual dance motion it allows for a an engaging dance experience (of course still nothing compared to actually going out with friends). Read More

I just read the review of Mafia 2 over on Eurogamer and it honestly kinda pissed me off. It’s not so much that they gave it 4/10. I don’t give a rats ass about numerical ratings. But the points of critique they brought up, those I care about. They essentially say Mafia 2 is not GTA, and therefore it’s a bad game. This is ridiculous and very very sad that they as a reputable and professional game reviews site get down to such shallow measures. Well they didn’t actually compare it to GTA that much, but they whine about there not being much to do in the open world environment. They criticize the missions as simplistic and repetitive, the in-game radar is complained about and some of the level design and a bunch of other nitpicking. Read it yourself if you like, I want to keep my article free of links to dumb articles like that. The only valid point of critique (in my eyes) is them saying they didn’t like the plot of Mafia 2. They say Vito Scaletta is a character without depth that does as he is told (which I don’t think to be true, he has several moments of inobedience), and that the other characters are all clichee. If they don’t like that aspect, okay, I can live with that. Read More

There is a genre that I really can’t stand playing, not because the games are dead boring or of generally bad quality, but because they feel tooreal to me as a player. It’s the horror game genre with games such as the classic Resident Evils and Silent Hills. I mean those games apparently are amazing masterpieces, from what I hear, but I never can get my nerves together for long enough to finish one of them. In fact, I usually quit the game after the second scary moment in a game. In Silent Hill 2 I stopped the game before even getting to the town. That whole eerie fog and the sounds scared the living hell out of me. Funny though that I find most of the supposedly scary horror movies (Grudge, Ring, both jap. versions and etc) really just entertaining, and not that scary at all. I can’t help but laugh out loud sometimes even when a particular cheap trick is used in a particular cheap way. So…what is it with those freaking games? Read More

In “A Study in Scarlet”, Sherlock Holmes is first introduced to the reader by the narrator and companion Dr. Watson. It is through his eyes that we perceive the story and Holmes’ actions, not counting in the second part that explains some of the necessary background of the plot. What I find so interesting is that Holmes’ skill of observation and deduction is largely the key for his success in uncovering the murder mystery. It’s as I believe a very classic structure. A murder happens, the hero (Holmes) comes onto the scene some time after the incident happened, searches for clues and goes off making his deductions and conclusions. In between, there is enough space for interrupting events and twists in the plot that can lead to the need to change the theory of the detective, or that can help flesh out and advance the theory. Read More

Hello people! Just got back from the countryside, and wow just one week gone and the online space seems to have moved on so much, I don’t have the time to read all my RSS subscriptions, lol.

As I was away from my computer and enjoying a refreshingly intact ecosystem (my homeland of west Mongolia is beautiful) I was pondering on where to go with my JRPG Engine, or better, how to make use of it. I’m not very thrilled with making a traditional game adhering to genre standards, so I’ll share with you some of my thoughts on RPG design in general.  It’s all loosely related to my previous post on non-linearity. As I see it when playing the common RPGs out there today (Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age, Fallout 3), I find the main philosophies of RPG design are: Bethesdas open-world games, the Bioware RPGs and JRPGs.

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What’s up? The Pathfinding tutorial is! After a bunch of stuff keeping me from finishing it, I’ve finally made it. As announced in the previous post, the code is onGitHub from now on. You can get the entire source code in a nice zip or tar archive over here. I’ve tried to make the code as easy to understand as possible, because I simply don’t have the time nor nerve to explain every single line there is. Instead, I’ll focus on explaining the logic of the code as easily to understand as possible, and only refer to actual code when it’s really important. You are really going to need to get the code, Alt+Tab between this tutorial and the code I’m referring to pretty much all the time. The screenshots of code I’m showing here are only telling you part of the story. Apart from the pathfinding code, there are several other bigger changes made to the code ever since tutorial number 4. Major additions are:

You can try the SWF directly here. Read More

Alright, I needed a break from coding, and I thought I’d write a bit about one of my favorite books, which is actually the series called Ender’s Saga. Overall, as far as I’m aware, there are 9 books by now. It’s a Science-Fiction novel, and the first book is – not by a too high margin – the best in the series, so don’t feel too bad if you don’t read the sequels.

It’s about this boy, who is a “Third”, which means he is the third child in his family. In the future envisioned by author Orson Scott Card, overpopulation on earth led to birth policies that forbid people to have more than 2 children. But Ender, the boy, is a legitimate child, because he was born by request of the International Fleet. That is the military organization that has the task of finding extraordinarily intelligent children and to train them in military tactics. Why would they use children? The IF has a method of determining geniuses from birth (or even when they’re in the womb). They implant a device called a “monitor” that is linked to the brain of the child, so as the baby discovers the world in their first years, the IF is supervising the mental growth of the child. They know them inside-out and can determine if they are fit to be shaped into super-genius generals with their super advanced training methods at Battle School, which is basically a military academy in space, taking advantage of the higher learning speed of children. Why do they need them to be generals? Because humanity has been invaded and heavily damaged twice in the past by the alien species called the “Formics”, or “buggers” in the common language.

So Ender, who is chosen to enter Battle School at the age of 5 (I’m not too sure), leaves his family behind. That is the basic premise of the story. Read More