August 16th, 2009
Typical spanish rip off. I buy “pains au chocolat” in the Caprabo, here’s what I get. Notice how one of them, still sealed, is like 25% shorter than usual. It looks like a piece has been cut with a knife, probably a hungry employee in the pains-au-chocolat factory or something.
This is the 3rd time it happens to me, after buying yogurts already open and empty Nescafé packs (1 pack in a box of 10 containing no powder at all).
Fucking BS place.
August 11th, 2009
I’ve been working a little bit on my Konoko Payne level. I’m usually on the software engineering side of things, so progress is slow and results certainly do not look next-gen or anything. But I’m quite happy with how it turned out. With some more years of practice I might be able to create decent-looking levels 
Anyway I was thinking about sharing a few pictures:
Now, as I was saying, there’s a very strong GITS influence here. So much that you could call it a complete rip-off. But hey, I’m not selling this thing, I’m only practicing my MAX skills. So no harm done. I created some cool comparison pics to show the scene in KP and the original scene in GITS. The GITS pics have been taken with a crappy digital camera so they’re kind of bad. On the other hand using a digital camera blurs everything out and curiously makes it look better than the real thing.
Konoko Payne on the left, Ghost In The Shell on the right:
Here are bigger, individual versions:
In any case this project is a lot of fun!
August 11th, 2009
Afro Samurai is a really frustrating game. But it has one interesting feature that makes it worth checking: you can cut enemies in half with your sword. It’s intriguing, you can move a cut-line over the character when you’re in “focus mode”, and it looks a lot like my previous character-cut demo. I wonder if they also do the cut at runtime, or if it’s all pre-cut ?? Drop me a line if you’re one of the devs!
Assassin’s Creed is also frustrating. I finally took the time to play it, and now it looks like I hit a fucking bug that prevents me from progressing further. I’m in Damascus, 4th mission, I went to the Bureau leader, I climbed all the watchpoints, but my objectives (pickpocket, etc) never appeared on the map. I’m stuck and it seems I will have to start again from scratch. Or better: forget that game altogether.
Frustrating, yes, but not as much as Nightshade ever was. Fun fact: there’s a “retry counter” in Nightshade, that lets you know the number of times you restarted a mission (in one sitting, it gets reset each time you go back to the main menu). Well I can tell you from painful experience that this counter does not go above 99 Yes, that’s right, I restarted some of those insane levels more than a hundred times. In one sitting. Oh yeah I can be pretty stubborn. But I finished the damn game, at least.
August 11th, 2009
July 25th, 2009
This recent podcast from Jeff & Casey about airport security reminded me of our current relocation ”issues”. Thing is, we have two guinea pigs at home. Yeah, the same fluffy animals as in G-Force. And apparently it’s next to impossible to move them to another country in an airplane. Dogs? No problem. Cats? No problem. You can take those as hand luggage provided you use an appropriate bag. But for guinea pigs, niet, verboten, forget it.
Of course we got a bit puzzled by this apparently bizarre racism against those cute, innocent rodents. So we asked. It turns out guinea pigs are forbidden in airplanes because they “could escape and eat the cables”. That’s it, that’s the only answer we got.
Hmmm. I don’t know. Are you telling me that the integrity of the airplane can be jeopardized by attacking a maverick cable in a corner, left so unprotected that it is vulnerable to a fucking guinea pig ?!
July 17th, 2009
A while ago I started a small shaft model in MAX. I stopped this for months but now I have some time to continue. I worked a bit on it today, and made some progress. It will be included in the next KP release.
July 9th, 2009
There have been a lot of discussions in the past, about various “re-texturing” projects for ONI. So the idea is simply to replace the old small textures with high-res, modern versions. Simple enough, but because of the lack of artists in the small ONI community, those projects never went very far.
A few days ago though, someone named “Severed” released a bunch of new textures for various ONI characters. Needless to say, I immediately jumped on them and tried them in KP. So, here are some results:
I think it looks gorgeous. Of course, not really next-gen or anything, but definitely an improvement compared to the originals (which tended to be on the small and blurry side, PS2-oblige).
If somebody else wants to contribute high-res textures, you’re more than welcome
Konoko Payne, June 2009 release
July 2nd, 2009
Here is a new Konoko Payne release. That’s the good thing about not having a job anymore, you get some free time for side projects
The changelist, grosso-modo:
So basically a lot of random stuff. The first version of the helicopter fight I previously mentioned is in. It’s interesting to see that gameplay, what makes your game a game, what makes your game fun, is not really tied to complex algorithms or clever optimizations. At the end of the day, what counts is all the tedious grunt work required to link A to B when C happens under circumstances D. If the player doesn’t figure out what to do after 60 seconds, start a special event to help him. If he does, make sure the help event is canceled. If he reaches the boss without a weapon, make sure there’s still a way to win the fight. If he defeats all the small guys, start this cutscene to show that the big guy is taking over. If he defeats the big guy, start this other cutscene. If he wants to use this item at that moment on that guy, make sure it works as the player would expect. Etc, etc. Lots of small, dirty, “ugly”, conditional code that wouldn’t win anything in a beauty contest, but that contributes a lot to the final fun factor.
In my role of newbie game designer here, I think the trick is to make sure the player is never bored. That’s probably why I keep adding new gameplay features, at the risk of never finishing this thing. For example this new release now has achievements - yep, the same as on Xbox. In ONI, if you got tired of hand-to-hand combat, you could switch to weapons. Now if you get tired of shooting, hey, you can collect those bonus objects. In the may release I also introduced the “puppet master” mode, which allows you to take control of enemies (like in Ghost in the Shell). It gives the player one more option: if he’s tired of combat, he can try the sneaking / ghost approach and walk undetected nearby enemies. The big issue of course is to make sure all the game mechanics work well together, instead of phagocyting eachother savagely. They must be well-balanced and all that. I’m certainly not there yet!
Another aspect is to make sure you thought about everything the player can try - and implemented a proper reaction. It’s like in Dungeon Master on ST in 1987. Part of why that game was so great is because no matter what you tried, the devs had thought about it first and there was an appropriate reaction in the game. Like, you’re at the very end of the game, seconds away from the ending… and no, you decide to go back all the way from level 13 to level 00 with the Firestaff… and bam! They thought about it too, alternate ending.
AZERTY keyboards are better :)
June 25th, 2009
Oh you gotta love those absolutely non provocative titles.
I only use AZERTY keyboards. I’m useless with a QWERTY (or worse, the swiss QWERTZ). Each time people tried to use my PC in the office, they sat down, typed for 10 seconds, stopped, looked confused, looked down at the keyboard… and asked me why the hell I wasn’t using a “normal” keyboard.
So, for the records: the AZERTY keyboard (or at least the AZERTY layout, I guess none of you still looks at the keyboard while typing, right?) is more efficient for coding, because it gives you the best of both worlds:
- if you want to type a number, you can use the numeric keypad on the right. Sorry guys, I know a lot of you hate it and just never use it, but hey, I grew up with this thing typing hexadecimal numbers from source code published in magazines. Trust me: for entering a lot of numbers at the same time, nothing beats the keypad.
- if you want to type a bunch of symbols widely used while programming, like:
& ” ‘ ( ) - _ = ! :
…well they are all available without pressing SHIFT. All of them. Compare this to the QWERTY layout which “wastes” keys by having “redundant” direct entries for all the numbers. Forcing you to press SHIFT much more often than AZERTY users.
So, AZERTY, less SHIFT pressing, better.
What do you mean you’re not convinced ?!
