Colors! v1.04 released.
http://www.collectingsmiles.com/colors/
New for this version is the fuzzy brush, remembering pressure calibration between sessions and a lot of minor changes.
Enjoy!
(I suck at remembering what I’ve changed, sorry.)
Posted: July 24th, 2007 under Projects.
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Mud and plenty of wind can turn a tent into a flying dragon!
Oh sweet mud. I had the pleasure of attending the Roskilde Festival and watch a few bands like BJÖRK-INFLAMES-ROKYERICKSON-BEASTIEBOYS-DIZZEERASCAL-CSS-QUEENSOFTHESTONEAGE-MUSTASCH-BONDEDEROLE-FLAMINGLIPS-CULTOFLUNA.
But since this is a gaming-blog I will not bore you with that. Instead I’d like smoothly move the topic over to licensed music in games. In The Darkness we did a pretty cool thing. We crammed the disc full with video content that ran on the in-game TVs that were scattered all over the game. We had a couple of different channels with movies like To Kill a Mockingbird and a bunch of episodes of Flash Gordon. These were all public domain, so we could basically do what we wanted with them, but one of the channels in the game was reserved for modern Swedish metal-music. I think we have about 26 music videos in there performed by small Swedish metal bands like Closer, Defleshed, El Caco, F.K.Ü, Acid House Kings, man.machine.industry etc. It was a great way for us to get some extra spice into the game as well as for the artists to promote their music. Then, we ran into the legal nightmare. Most of these artists the were interested in having their songs in the game where registered with STIM as well as some other organization which I don’t remember the name of. Because of that, we couldn’t just have the artists’ permission to put the songs in the game, but STIM demanded huge amounts of money of us to have them in there. This is perhaps understandable since they are there to make sure the artists don’t get screwed and they tried to apply their standing rules probably created for TV and movies but they had little interest to work around them. Still, after some dreadful legal mumbo-jumbo and some tremendous work by our super-hero lawyer, they finally got the picture and everyone was happy.
This made me realize how young the games industry is in many ways. We want to grow up and be able to use all the resources all other media use, but the structure just isn’t there yet. We also tried to have a famous song running during the end credits but the number we were given to just use the lyrics where ridiculous, probably because they used the same payment scheme as the end-credits of a Hollywood movie. We found a good alternative to that as well, but it can be extremely hard run your head into the wall like that over and over again and I hope that this is something that will become easier as the industry grow even bigger.
Posted: July 17th, 2007 under Game design, Travel.
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Since I traveled with a few Irrational guys on my short trip through The New World, I got a chance to see Bioshock in quite some detail. This game has been in production in almost four years, which is a very long time for a video game. Now, I know how developing a game for a long time can be from a developer standpoint, but I’ve never spent much though on how the world’s perception of a game can evolve as well.
Bioshock was introduced to the world last E3 and was perceived by many as the Game of the Show. This gave me great pleasure since the game was so wonderfully weird and original. But things seemed to go downhill after E3, at least from my perspective. For every new screenshot or video released, my vision of what the game would be grew further away from what I wanted it to be. This may not be uncommon, but for Bioshock it really drained my enthusiasm. I’ve been talking to some people at Irrational from time to time during this last year and heard their perception of this as well as some of the development issues they have been facing, which has been extremely interesting. It has made me realize how connected the perception of an unreleased game affects the perception of its developers, and how that probably affect how the game turns out in the end. Isn’t that something that is very unique with this media?So, what am I getting to? Not very much other than that after this trip, all my faith in Bioshock has been restored. It may not be the game that I dreamt it would be after last year’s E3, but Irrational have turned my perfect dream into something just as good. So, just as I did last year, I once again believe it will be great. Even one of the Great Ones. August 21 will tell.
Posted: July 10th, 2007 under Game design, Games.
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As a final US stop, San Francisco was really perfect and took the top spot of my favorite city ever. I got to hang out with Jordan from Irrational as well as Steve from Perpetual which was really cool.
San Francisco is also the home of GDC (apart from a year in San Jose). I’ve never been there myself, but it seems to have become bigger and more interesting every year. Still, it seems a bit on the hefty side to charge so much for a conference ($1450 for a classic pass), and of course the total becomes much higher for people traveling from Sweden.
Posted: July 9th, 2007 under Games, Travel.
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