Tarnation wins Kongregate weekly contest!

Last week Tarnation won the weekly contest at Kongregate.com!

Thanks to everyone who played and voted.

Tarnation beta on Kongregate

My new game, Tarnation, is live:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/bradido/tarnation

Kongregate has been down today so here is an alt link:
http://www.bulletpattern.com/tarnation/ (I put Google ads on there, please don't judge me too harshly)

Please play it, submit bugs/comments and give it a high rating :)

Sometime soon I will post the entire process of creating the game.

Painting - squid

I thought I should do the ubequitous squid piece.

Programming Spirit Revived

Recently Cartoon Network invited Flash expert Grant Skinner to give us a 2-day course on Actionscript 3. It was really informative and, perhaps more importantly, it was very inspiring.

I had this idea a while back to do terrain based on perlin noise for Flash but I didn't pursue it. Inspired by the course I did a small demo.



It read the perlin noise and creates terrain. I made the low areas blue (water!) and the higher areas dirt and grass. I put gskinner ColorMatrix class in there too to fool with colors.

Digital painting

About 6 months ago I got a tablet PC at work and was very excited. I started working in Alias Sketchbook often for concepting. Just doing sketches for level layouts and quick "communication sketches" which is my description of my er, shall we say, unrefined drawings that I give to the artists to communicate my ideas.

Recently I got rid of my tablet pc because it was underpowered and none of the CS3 suite worked with the pressure sensitivity. I just got a new laptop and a Wacom. Wacom tablets are so much nicer than tablets for drawing its crazy. I had no idea of the difference.

I have always been blown away by digital paintings at site like conceptart.org and and my previous attempts at digital painting were a disaster. Recently I found this tutorial and this one. This guys art blows me away. After laboring over his tutorials and fooling around I think I have found a style that suits me pretty well.

I am going to be trying to do a couple quick paintings a week and post them so I can practice and (hopefully) track my development. These are just practice pieces.

Flower

Fish

Once I work my way through the Fs I will move onto the Ks.

I already redid some art in my game this way so you can see the updated stuff in the alpha posting.

That game sucks

Useless Words
I am getting really tired of hearing games described in such arbitrary terms such as "awesome" and "sucks." I am 33 years old and my friends tell me games suck. This kind of rhetoric has no value to me. Its for teens communicating to their friends in their vague and undeveloped language.

I actually had a friend say to me, "That game sucks so bad... I played through it 3 times and..."

So the game "sucked" yet you played the game in its entirety 3 times?

Granted, I am sensitive to the feeling of the people who made these games. I know they worked hard and more importantly game developers always WANT to make a game that will be loved by all.


Fun vs. Flaws
Of late I have been trying to think of games as fun vs. flaws. Nearly all games have SOME fun element to them and ALL games have flaws. The quesion is: do the flaws outweigh the fun?

I don't think any game can be free of flaws but it seems a game can be damned for a flaw that does not affect gameplay just as quickly as kiss-of-death flaws like unresponsive controls or a bad camera.

I nitpick games probabaly more than most but I always try to ask myself, "Does this really detract from the gaming experience?" Most often that answer is no, I am just nitpicking elements that could have been better with unlimited time and budget.

Useless Language on the Horizon
Recently I keep seeing things such as "this game is too repetitive" and "this game is too short" and serious flaws. So is Tetris flawed because its repetitive? I know this is not an apples to apples comparison but these statements are being used more and more by gaming journalist and quickly becoming damning features of a game.

The problem isn't that the game is repetitive. ALL games are repetitive! The problem is the core mechanic cannot withstand be played numerous times without becoming easily mastered and therefore boring.

Stupid Example
Jaws Unleashed scored around a 4 at every review site. I will not argue that game is seriously flawed but, my god, that game is so fun. I have played other higer scoring games that don't even come to close to the good times I have had with Jaws Unleashed. The flaws in that game are ENOURMOUS but come on, playing a shark and spitting torpedoes at offshore oil rigs, it doesn't get better than that.