Indie Games Galore!

Going to GDC always inspires me to go on an indie game bender. A few of us are sitting at this big award show hosted by the Independent Games Festival (IGF) waiting for the Game Developer’s Choice Awards and feeling guilty that we’ve played 0% of the games they’re calling out. Between the bunch of us we only heard of like three games they talked about…

So, within the next week I start getting games from Steam, downloading them for the PC or getting them for my iPhone. The one thing I found about a lot of these indie games I’m interested in is that most of the nominees (and some of the winners) haven’t even released their game yet. How does that work exactly? Does this happen in the movie industry too? “Well, no one has seen this movie yet, but here’s your award, I’m sure it’ll turn out great.”

Anyway, after getting back from San Fransisco, I went on my yearly indie game binge. Here’s a quick run down of the games I played:

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Game Developer’s Conference ’09 Summaries

A group of us from various companies have decided to put all of our notes, summaries and recaps together from the ’09 Game Developers Conference and publish them for anyone to check out. We even split up on some talks when we were in San Fransisco in order to cover more ground!

Yes, you can buy the audio and video for various talks through the GDC website. However, they’re expensive and I’ve always found it easier to find info if it’s all in text, since I can easily search for things I’m interested in. Plus I can skip around, come back to other sections later, read it on my iPhone etc. You’ll find that some people just put up their notes and outlines of the talks (me!) while other tried to tell more of a story of what happened. I’d be interested to find which format you all found more useful!

Anyway, feel free to share this with the world. It’s not complete yet as people are still adding their content, and there are a few more people who will be contributing, but there’s already a ton of talk summaries up to peruse at your leisure.

In case you missed the link above, here it is again.

GDC 2009!

I’m getting stoked about GDC! As usual I’ll be taking notes and pooling them with a few other developers from various companies. I’m mainly going to design talks, but there are a few production and post-mordem type talks as well. I’m really interested in what Maxis / EA wants to say about Spore. The Blizzard talks are usually good as well.

I also know a few people giving talks this year! Be sure to check out David Wu’s talk on animation, Corrine Yu’s talk on the future of multicore processing and Andy Luedke’s talk on graphics programming! Be warned, I got a preview of Corrine’s talk and it was waaaay over my head, but I’m sure anyone who hasn’t quickly forgotten Calculus will understand what she’s talking about.

Maybe I’ll see you there! If you see a guy wearing a Zombie Train T-Shirt or a COD:WaW DevTeam hoodie then it’s probably me. Feel free to say “Hi!” since I’m not a scary guy and you won’t catch me alone anyway. Be sure to stop by the Microsoft booth as well… we are hiring after all!

One Year (and two days)!

It’s been a little over a year now since I started this blog. About this time last year, GDC has just finished up and I was inspired by Patrick Curry’s blog (which seems to have fallen into disrepair) to start a developer blog of my own. Blog. Blog, blog, blogity. Blog.

The most popular post? The one about Nazi Zombies, of course. However, the gamer Myers / Briggs personality type post gets quite a few hits as does the collectible design post. For the occasional review, people generally search them for how to beat certain parts of the game, where to find items and so on.

I think doing the game review thing is fun since it forces me to think much more about the games I play and not simply be entertained by them. However, I’ve been slacking. I’ve been playing a lot of games and not writing about them. I blame it on the influx of games around Christmas… there was just too much to play! I think in the future I’ll do less review-y type stuff (or make those posts more terse) and focus more on design “issues” and concepts. Those are more fun to write about anyway.

So, yeah. One year (and two days). Here’s to a bunch more.

“Achievement Guides”

Dear Internet,

Please stop publishing “Achievement Guides” that simply list the all the possible achievements found in a game. I can do that from within the game itself. A guide is supposed to tell me the best way to get certain achievements, not just tell me what they are.

Love,

Sir Haxington

Terrible Game Mechanics #13 – Weapon Jamming

Seriously? In a video game?

Okay, I could understand if you’re making a simulation and you want to train me or teach me what to do in an actual fire fight where a weapon jam might occur. However, I bristle when ever weapon jams are brought up as a possible mechanic when making a shooter (this happens more than you’d expect). Game developers of the future… please stop making my virtual weapons jam!

Halo 3 Stencils

As you may know, I’m into geocaching quite a bit. I’ve found some really cool caches, and some not so cools caches. I always appreciate a well made cache much more than most cache you find out in the wild. Some caches are pure awesome. You can tell the person hiding the cache put a lot of effort either in creating the puzzle to find the cache, the sneaky hiding place they put the cache, the neat container they made, or the art on the cache itself.

So, my plan is to hide four Halo 3 themed ammo can geocaches in Washington somewhere. Since there’s four difficulty levels in Halo 3, each hide will be harder than the next. The Legendary hide will be extremely challenging and will possibly include a tough puzzle coupled with a tricky and physically exerting hide.

I created some stencils for each difficulty level in Halo 3 that will be spray painted on each ammo can. Once I made the stencils though, I realized that other fans of the series might want them for other reasons… so I’m posting them here! They’re in an Illustrator (.ai) file, so you can change the color and scale as you wish. I’m displaying them as green and yellow since the ammo cans are green and yellow looks good on green, but I may change my mind later.

Anyway, here’s the source file for the stencils… enjoy!

Disclaimer: Although I work at Microsoft, the following has nothing to do with work or is meant to promote any games I’m working on. Remember… these are Halo 3 themed and I have never and currently do not work for Bungie! I’m doing this solely in my spare time and as something I like to do as a hobby. Nothing from my work was used in the creation of anything described in this post.

More Nazi Zombie Quickies

Not sure if this is actually due to Nazi Zombies or not, but the resemblance is uncanny so I thought I’d link it anyway. Shabs, a guy I used to work with at Treyarch send me a link to this game called SAS Zombie Assault, which is a top-down flash version of Nazi Zombies.

Also, someone started a site / blog dedicated to Nazi Zombies over at the aptly named nazizombies.com. Why didn’t Activision buy that webspace? Oh well, kudos for getting the best URL ever!

Hopefully by now every has seen the trailer for Dead Snow (Or Dod Sno) which is a Norweigen horror film that features- you guessed it… Nazi zombies. Okay, so Nazi Zombies the game and Dead Snow the movie have nothing to do with each other, but the trailer is still awesome and worth checking out! I think the movie is out now, so I’ll be watching it in the near future hopefully…

So there you have it, a few more references to Zombies, Nazis, and combinations thereof.

Activity Books and Spartan Robots

So, as you may or may not know I worked on a little something called Nazi Zombies. Seems like those nasty Nazi Zombies are getting more traction than I thought. A few links people have sent me the past few days have brought a smile to my face.

The first Nazi Zombie reference, by someone over at The Minus World is the Call of Duty Activity Book For Kids which does some much appreciated Call of Duty satire. Included are plenty of Nazi Zombie jokes, such as an exercise in creating the next version of Nazi Zombies!

Then today, everyone on my instant messenger list sent me a link to this little gem, where some Nazi Zombie fan in Austin, Texas hacked a road sign to warn of an impending Nazi Zombie attack. Okay, so while I don’t condone vandalism, I thought the story was pretty awesome. There are less dangerous (and more legal) ways to show your appreciation for Nazi Zombies, but it was all in good fun and no one was hurt. But next time, bake a giant Nazi Zombie themed cake and give it to a homeless shelter or something if you want to get on the news! I’m waiting for the impending “blame video games” story to follow…

Anyway, I love seeing stories like this, keep ’em coming!

An Oldie But a Goodie – Halo: Combat Evolved

Yes, that’s right. The first Halo. I recently finished played though it again (on normal, which was difficult enough) since I had never done a proper play through back in the day. I played sections of it at friends houses, played some multiplayer here and there, but I never played it from beginning to end. Shhh, don’t tell anyone – I never owned an original Xbox.

So how does Halo hold up over all these years? It’s interesting. Some parts of the game hold up really well, while others make you wonder why it got above a 90%. I guess combat has evolved over the past few years.

What stands out the most is how solid the game is in general. Even today, there aren’t many shooters that have such varied and interesting weapons. There’s enough different types of enemies and vehicles to keep game play interesting and the story and presentation are very well done. Another suprising thing is that you don’t come across many bugs or unpolished features.

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