Short update on TRAUMA. I know things are getting a bit silent here. That’s mostly because I’m trying not to get swamped in work and get TRAUMA as much done as I can before the IGF. I’m still working on that Intro. I think I will wrap up some of the more complex CGI scenes that involve particle effects today. I must say I’m not impressed with the particle functions of the 3D package of my choice. Due to their limitations I have been forced to get into scripting and even that works very poorly. I will go with Blender for my next projects. If I have poor functionality, it can be at least for free and with a light-weight system footprint. But I’m finally through. here is a small teaser.

Otherwise here are some more Interviews and Articles on TRAUMA.

Kotaku has a Road to IGF Feature which I really liked. Surprisingly, some of the answers/questions didn’t make the cut for the article. Here is one I hated and liked at the same time:

Q: Name your favorite book, movie, album and game?
I have to pick one?! You are torturing me!
My favorite book would be definitively something by Stanislaw Lem.
My favorite movie is quite possibly something by Christopher Nolan.
My favorite album is a tough one – Wide Angle by Hybrid, Speak for Yourself by Imogen Heap, Discovery by Daft Punk, Emotional Technology by BT or Big Calm by Morcheeba. It’s like picking your favorite child.
As for games, I give up. I’ve played too many. Most of the time it’s the game I’m currently playing. Here is a random little-known classic gem that is not Zelda, Mario or Metroid: Mystic Quest on Game Boy aka Final Fantasy Adventure aka Seiken Densetsu.

If you speak German, here is an Interview with Spielbar.de – a Blog of the Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung (German Federal Agency for Civic Education).

But probably most exciting, here is an article that REALY blew me away. Ryan Kuo, one of the IGFs judges wrote a short post with some thoughts on TRAUMA. It’s the closest you will read to a review of the game so far and it has some very insightful observations.

You don’t imagine yourself into the worlds of Half-Life 2 or Myst, because those games simply show it all. Trauma, meanwhile, is a game about imagining, where nothing is shown simply. A strange act of doubling therefore occurs: The blatant subjectivity and natural instability of the girl’s memories align with the obvious artifice of the game world, and this more accurately reproduces human experience than Valve’s and Cyan’s literal re-creations.

I’m really glad TRAUMA was already able to reach people like him. That article made me look forward to the release even more. And on this note, I think the current render finished already few minutes ago…

(I should be writing my thesis but a man’s gotta let off steam sometimes, right?)

Bayonetta is supposed to have this perfect score combat gameplay, and it IS pretty fun, but the game doesn’t do any efforts to lead the player into the depth. I’m sure there’s audience that takes great pleasure in exploring that depth on its own, but I do think you can be transparent AND deep at the same time, without being prescriptive.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is a good example. (Note I’m not good at Batman’s combat, and probably it’s too easy in comparison and for dedicated gamers.) Anyone played it knows: Batman doesn’t work with big move lists and long combo strings. The complexity comes from how you handle the enemies and varied use of your arsenal. Almost every button is mapped to a combat move, but their actions hardly change depending on the pressing sequence.

In other words, all the information is in the world — and the player can concentrate on judging the situation and (re)act accordingly. Working with this kind of ‘external memory’ is thus a more humane design than the elaborate combos no-one can keep in his mind. Ninja Gaiden has this problem too. Bayonetta is supposed to be the best of this breed — I can only hope that everything clicks when I’m more comfortable with the system.

Don’t get me wrong, so far I’m enjoying it. It’s much less frustrating than Ninja Gaiden. Cheesy cutscenes, nerd-jokes and the sexploitation certainly help reducing it. Also instead of the relatively passive block-n-wait approach of Ninja Gaiden, Bayonetta’s Witch Time (apparently evolved from Viewtiful Joe’s Slow-Mo-Power and feels a bit like SF3’s parries) keeps things more fluent.

Seems I like it better than Ninja Gaiden? Better than the second one, that’s for sure.

Some very dramatic changes happened in the last few days. First, I finally got a new workstation. But then it’s a MacBook. So I Bootcamp’ed it and put Windows 7 on it. And then I decided to throw away most of the crap on my desk, especially my old CRT Monitor. Workspace feels very comfy now.

There are a lot of new impressions to take in. New hardware, new software. Here are some bullet-points of some of the things I notced. First, the bad:

• Lower Resolution: WTF? This MacBook has actually lower resolution than my 5 years old ASUS? I’m going to need that huge external display soon.
• Not as much space as I thought: I got the 500GB hard drive. After Bootcamp 250GB left. After installing all my stuff 90GB. This is melting away rather quickly.
• I hate Apple for the display adapters: Seriously, shame on you, Apple. My girlfriend has the newest MacBook, two display port converters and none of the actually work on my MacBook Pro. What’s so hard about just putting a standard VGA Port on that thing? And why wasn’t at least the adapter included? I have now an expensive piece of hardware that theoretically could run projectors. I just don’t have the physical means to attach it to them.
• Two USB Ports: Wow. Seriously? I could understand that on a MacBook but on a MacBook Pro? Wow. Let’s see, I use a mouse, a tablet and… well there you go. Goodbye external hard drives, USB sticks, printer… Can anyone suggest a spiffy portable USB hub?
• The keyboard is all rong: It’s not that bad as I thought but it’s inconvenient. I’m still looking on the workaround to have the PrintScreen key. On the other hand, I found the key combinations that unlock the forbidden powers of del, pos1, end, page up and page down. So I’m mostly set. If only @ was a little less difficult to produce.
• 64bit is pain: I know that there is a super-good reason for this whole 64bit thing. The user-side experience is that half of the stuff doesn’t work properly. For example the Cisco VPN client required to have proper internet back at where I work. Who can I blame it for now?

But wait, not all is lost. There are lots of good things about this new change.

• This is fast on an entirely new level: Ok, maybe not that fast but at least After Effects in HD works quite fine now. The improvement is profound. Further work on TRAUMA should go much easier now. This alone was worth it actually.
• Surprisingly trouble-free: Surprisingly, the setup and my move from one system to the next was done in less than a workday. There were also hardly any hardware configuration issues. Any little kinks I could solve pretty quickly. I guess this is due to both – the whole Apple thing (Hardware and Software) and Windows 7. I love how all the drivers come from one source (Apple) in one package (Bootcamp).
• Epic Win 7: Well, again maybe not epic but good. It is very different from XP but it looks like I can get used to it. A couple of standard dialogs already surprised me with cool UI details. But I will keep a watchful eye on this one. Especially as Win 7 still takes considerably longer to boot up than Mac OS X.
• I will survive: One of the reasons why I chose a Mac was simply because they are quite sturdy. One of the problems I had with my old Asus was that it started to fall apart structurally. The display hinges broke pretty much by themselves and needed constant touch-up. The plastic got digested by the venom my tentacles produce. From what I can tell the Mac is better suited for the harsh environment I call work. Using metal as material is already quite promising. The fact that many people own EXACTLY THIS model and can help when things go kaput is a big plus too. I’m expecting a lot here.

So that’s it. Work on TRAUMA continues now. I did already a couple of things for it in my new Workspace and it is much easier now. I know there are some people out there curious about how this Mac/Windows experiment will turn out. I will keep you updated

Today I got some tricky shots in for TRAUMA. These were actually the first ones where you can see the face of the main protagonist. So far, she existed only as a voice but I couldn’t get around showing a human face after all. I’m working on the intro sequence which needs to show the condition of a protagonist. As the no-budget indie developer I am, I hired my girlfriend as the actress.

To not to spoil anything, I will only show you a part of her face right now.

The shots were tricky because I needed to somehow convey the meaning of being in a hospital without actually having access to a hospital. I have some friends who actually work at a hospital but they weren’t able to get permissions for me to get into an ICU. So we’ve bought a couple of green bedsheets at IKEA, some bandages (tuns out we didn’t have any at home – yikes!) and I’ve built a completely non-functional Nasal Cannula with some transparent tubes and superglue. Ah, the wonders of the silverscreen.

Yet I could still use a couple of shots to boost the credibility so if you are reading this and know how to get me and my camera for a couple of minutes into a hospital in or around Cologne (without actually having to have an accident), give a shout!

Progress with TRAUMA grinds to a halt whenever I get swamped in work in my dayjob. My girlfriend being sick doesn’t help. It seems like I won’t make it this year after all. But I made a storyboard for the missing parts and I organized a camera and scheduled the shooting. Will try to wrap up most of the project during holidays.

The worst thing is that I get into this self-reinforcing state where I’m frustrated with my lack of progress so I play games to have at least some sense of getting things done… instead of REALLY getting things done. Which brings me to PixelJunk Shooter.

I fell in love with the PixelJunk games long before I even played them. Especially Eden caught my attention. I always thought they were on Xbox. So I was very disappointed when I bought one and realized they were PSN exclusives. I bought Eden when I finally got the PS3 Slim but it got buried in the backlog. It may be because Eden is quite time-consuming.

But now there is PixelJunk Shooter. A slim, cool, fresh, cheap and extremely well-done game. It’s basically a twin-stick shooter in a cave with some remarkable liquid physics. It comes in a cartoony pastel look and with some extraordinary music by High Frequency Bandwidth (which I admit I haven’t heard before but I’ll just continue pretending I know what I’m talking about).

Continue reading “PixelJunk Shooter is Awesome”