Sunday, April 1, 2012

Into Q2

"Been awhile." Snake Plissken.

Andrew Childer's work documenting the story behind "The Inalienable Dreamless" is now available on Amazon! Also out now, Black Powder \\ Red Earth V2 on Kindle and Hardcopy. The work that has gone into both of these projects has been very time consuming.

Work on V3 of BPRE is nearly finished. Inks and colored pages are supposed to be in this week, then I have to letter it and prep for the printer/Kindle store.

GDC 2012 was inspiring, as usual. Lots of great presentations, a chance to chat with other developers, see what their solutions were to common problems, etc. Also got a chance to hang out with my gaming Dali Lama - Sean Cooper! Good times :-D

As soon as we returned, the first code started coming together for the new BPRE game we are producing. I'm collaborating with Max again, you might know him as the cranky Austrian guy from the Gamespot series. We're already 3 builds in (we release new versions of the game weekly for testing) and it's exciting to have that fire again, seeing things come together quickly, while Altay works on the engine that will be powering the actual release of the game.

There's still a long way to go, but I think we're onto something pretty great, which is something I wasn't sure we'd be able to achieve after playing BF3 (which is in so many ways, the game I've wanted for over 10 years).

The new game I'm playing is Armored Core V, with Battlefield 3 coming out of a short sabbatical that was Syndicate co-op and the Mass Effect 3 campaign. The Syndicate campaign held my attention for less than 3 levels and the ME3 multiplayer simply wasn't my cup of tea.

Armored Core V has been quite the experience. It's kind of a cluttered mess. The core idea is good but OMFG the story really really sucks. Gone is the ability to choose your path through the game and here to stay is a linear campaign flanked by dozens of vaguely related side missions. I've barely gotten into the online element as no one from my "team" ever seems to be online. Ever. I've tried switching teams but to no avail. I've got about 3-4 hours in and I am just starting to understand the layers in the AC configuration screens. It's especially surprising considering I've played the past 2 AC games in Japanese with almost no ability to read and found them easier to navigate than this -_-

OK, what else.

Saw The Raid Redemption. It was cool but I'm not sure comparing it to Die Hard or the original Total Recall makes sense considering it was more of a martial arts film than an action film in that sense. At the end of the day, I still like Hard Boiled better, but I'm more into guns that punching people to death LOL Very skeptical about the new Total Recall. I like Colin Farrel but...

New GridLink presses on. More to follow.