Just completed the screenplay for issue 2 of the BPRE comic. It seems to take me around 60 days to crank out 30 pages or so of story. We'll see if issue 3 takes as long. There were a few minor edits made to the story to suit some stuff we needed to change in the Facebook game, where the story arc is approaching its conclusion as well.
I've had to add + cut a few things from the story in the interest of making the game, well, a game and not a purely narrative experience(that's why we decided to make a graphic novel as well). These changes were also partially driven by the results of a recent group chat among the players, where I found out users had a slightly different take of the world where the story/events were unfolding. I had originally pictured New Basra as a totally non-permissive environment where the characters would be operating in a completely clandestine manner. The users saw it more like modern day Iraq or civil war Beirut, where there were non-permissive, semi-permissive and permissive areas. At the end of the day, I decided to run with that and build from there.
At the end of the day, I lucked out, and the majority of the material worked within the reader's/player's understanding of reality as written. Win :-D
I spent last week working on the first round of BPRE Facebook ads, scheduled to drop this Tuesday. These are not the viral video pieces I wanted to do, but budget restrictions being what they are, we don't have $30,000 to make the piece I wanted to LOL Maybe next year.
There's a lot in the works for BPRE, including a new mode, which we have code named Task Force, that everyone on the team is pretty excited about. I'm down at Ft Bragg in 20 days shooting new content for this, so stay tuned, more on that in weeks to come.
The story and characters seem to be the same from dozens of other RT strat games I've played in the past decade. We're fighting bad guys and here comes some alien relics that could shift the balance of power, forever. You have the opportunist, the estranged rebel, the honorable commander, blah blah blah. It's just not pulitzer winning stuff I crave (yes, I realize that is a ridiculous expectation).
Then there's the gameplay...
After playing Company of Heroes, the combat in SCII seems kind of lame. SCII's control, like SC, is at a high level and distributed across resource harvesting, combat, infrastructure and tech trees rather than getting too detailed with any one specifically. After using complex squad tactics in CoH, I feel their absence in this experience. Then again, I stopped playing CoH specifically because the SP missions took forever and I found the tech tree, capabilities of the vehicle units and level of micro management to be such a pain in the ass. And with Red Dead Redemption in the other room, looming at 80% completion, it's hard to get excited about ordering little guys around the board to kill Germans/Zerg.
I always harken back to Syndicate. There were 4 guys to keep track of and I could do pretty elaborate things with them. It's probably still my favorite RTS. Then again, I got my Xbox out again and started playing Mercenaries - which is probably as close to Syndicate as anyone has gotten in the past 10 years LOL
Pre-orders for the rest of the year are now limited to Vanquish and Medal of Honor. I killed my Crysis 2 pre-order when it appeared it would trade North Koreans for PMC troops. Sigh. How original.
You would think bringing in RK Morgan would allow something a little more creative, but then again his last 3 books have barely held my attention. I liked him better when he was limited to 300 pages and shit was balls to the wall all the time(ie Broken Angels and Market Forces).
OK, I'm just crying now. Have a better one :)
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