Odds and ends

There's a bunch of things to gab about today.

To start with, what's on my mind this morning is the new James Cameron film Avatar. Theoretically still 6 months away, I'm starting to get the fever. Despite there being a host of other movies between now and then I am interested in, Avatar is the only one I think will both look great and have a great story (Star Trek surprised the hell out of me but more on that later).

Several pieces of concept art recently surfaced on the net. I found them via AICN but I'll send you to the source here:

http://marketsaw.blogspot.com/2009/05/want-to-see-what-whole-power-suit-might.html

I pretty much exploded the second I saw The Art of Avatar: James Cameron's Epic Adventurewas available for pre-order.

I haven't seen a trailer, a teaser or really much more than the previously linked pieces and yet, I am hopped up like I just pounded 4 Monster Khaos in a row. It's strange to believe after so many disappointments that I can still get hyped up about products/films/games, but there you go. 35 and I still have faith despite my general despair for the future.

Me and Michelle have spent a considerable amount of time trying to find a new school for my step kid, Mercedes aka Chebes aka Cheese Band. The more I learn about education, the less I am impressed with public schools. It's not really their fault mind you, but there's just not enough money to go around and what is one to do? Go the route of the EU and have much higher taxes to provide far better schools or simply privatize schooling entirely...The method that seems to be the most locked on is called "montessori". Google it if you're interested. I'm sure it's not a silver bullet for everyone but I like a lot of what they are about.

I'm reading Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Centuryright now. It's pretty engaging, especially after just finishing "Twisted Metal" by Tony Ballentine (which was fun but not something I ever need to read again. I'll probably pick up the sequels though ^o^). Wired For War is a pretty interesting look at robotics/drones in culture and warfare today and has some very interesting speculation about the future of the industry.

I've been working on client projects and the BPRE graphic novel(and by extension the Facebook game) screenplay this whole week. BPRE as a non-FPS title was really hard for me to swallow at first, but it's becoming clear that this route will allow us to really show off some of the research and story telling we wanted to do, but couldn't afford to create in a 3D experience.

Everyday requires me to embrace change as an artist and as a leader of creative organization. To our credit we've been pretty resilient at this. I am generally resistant to change, but I come around more often than not.

Have a better one :)

The past week I've been working on a vertical slice of our Facebook game. My job is to write the narrative that drives the player from area to area, to identify or invent all the tools(ie weapons, fieldware, armor, clothes) that the player will utilize during their adventure and create a "shot list" for the game, ie shots we want/need to capture to convey what is going on to the user. It's an interesting excercise in that it quickly tells you what you can/cannot do, ie if a sequence is too ambitious to represent, cut it and come up with something else!

We're going to be doing 2 photoshoots this summer. One in the US with some of the people at BDSCI (don't bother looking it up, they don't have a website) and then another overseas, most likely in Dubai to collect location shots. After the game is up and running we've discussed releasing a coffee table book with all the photos from the first "chapter" in high res for people to enjoy outside of the game. As you can imagine, our stuff is going to look a bit different than some of the other games that are out there.

We also settled on an artist to begin work on the BPRE graphic novel. We had a call this week and the artist will begin work on a style sheet shortly. We're still not 100% if the book will be color or B+W. I like both and I think either could work. I'm desperately trying to get the screenplay wrapped but it isn't easy with all the client work we've been running. I have a ton of notes laying out some scenes that had needed more...tissue.It's pretty insane how far the story has come since we switched our locations from Mars to Earth.

Been reading up all the books I can by David Ignatius. Started with Agents of Innocenceand then read Body of Lies: A Novel (Movie Tie-In). Agents is definitely the better read...maybe because when reading Body of Lies I had a pretty good idea of what was in the coming pages. Just ordered his new one, The Increment: A Novel, just shipped. I'm hoping it's killer ^_^;

I used to read nothing but scifi. Now, I feel like good sf is few and far. One trend I've become increasingly aware of is a sf author will get a great start. Fast paced adrenalin rush or super complex intrigue story...250-350 pages...Boom and we're out. By book 3 they are pushing 600 pages and much of it is not the gripping/ass kickery I originally signed on for. I suppose one cannot do the same thing forever but...I ordered Twisted Metal by Tony Ballentine a few weeks ago after Neal Asher raved about it in his blog, theSkinner. It's scheduled to ship any day now...sigh.

Crazy Super Alloy Giant Robot War is live

http://apps.facebook.com/giantrobotwar/

Our first Facebook "game" :-D

Games, Games, Games

One of the things we've been exploring for the past few months has been Facebook games. Altay turned the rest of us onto these games late last year and to my surprise, there have been a few that have got their hooks into me.

On Friday, we got the alpha of our first Facebook game online. A simple "gift" type game which we will do a formal announcement on in another few weeks. It's simple but addictive. Once we get that title released, so to speak, we'll be moving onto a Black Powder | Red Earth facebook experience. We've done quite a bit of design and work on it already and honestly, it's pretty exciting to be taking the first step into the BPRE universe. More to come ^_^;

Friday was also board game day. Every so often we break out new kinds of games that we don't regularly explore, because a.) it's good to try new things and b.) board/card games have had centuries to hone their multiplayer experiences whereas video games have only been around for few decades. Research value aside, they can also be tremendous amounts of fun.

This week we played:

• The Settlers of Catan
• Acquire Game

Settlers of Catan was a game we bought for Michelle's sister's, boy friend for xmas 07. He had raved about how awesome it was and at the time, it was fairly difficult to come by in his area, so we bought it on Amazon :P

Catan took about 1.5 hours to set up and play and it was awesome. We were all riveted the entire time. One of the coolest things about the game was that there was something for everyone to do every turn, meaning there's no sitting around and waiting for the dice to come back to you. There's an opportunity to take action every round.

This is something we strive for in our products. Our early iterations had a more Counter-Strike/SOCOM system with 1 life per round, but we found people, especially new players, were spending a lot of time being dead and just watching their team mates run around without them. We scrapped this at month 3 and went to a re-spawn based system which in the end turned out to be a much better match for our kind of game.

Acquire is one of Altay's finds. It had some interesting elements to it, but honestly, I felt it was long and dragged. I was bored, restless and by hour 2 I was getting up to check email between turns. I ended up winning some how, but honestly it wasn't my thing. It reminded me a bit of another German designer board game called El Grande.

I should mention, El Grande is a lot of fun and way more engaging than Acquire IMO. It's also the game responsible for me getting into the "designer German games". If you have at least two other people to play with, these games are highly recommended.

We didn't get the chance to spin up a game of Supremacy, which is an old favorite of mine, but wayyy out of print. I got a copy of that and another game the creators made called Roll Out on Ebay over Christmas. But considering how much I like these compact 1-2 hour experiences now, I wonder how much I will like games that used to take between 5-25 hours to complete.

This might be a reflection of my taste in general these days, though. I like that single player experiences have been scaled back to 5-7 hours in general before I am whisked off to multiplayer land, the exception being MGS4 which I was hooked on all the way through.

Return to sender

Spent the weekend in Fayetteville, North Carolina working on draft 2 of the Black Powder | Red Earth screenplay. I've been to Fayetteville 3 times now. To say that it is an alien place to me is an understatement. I've been to places where there are no roads and no one speaks English that are less foreign to me, which is a bit ironic considering how much I am interested in some of the units based there.

People range from good to surreal. But I imagine I come off just the same ^_^;

I picked up a MAV and some new speed load mag pouches from Eagle. If I ever have 5 minutes again maybe I will check them out. I was hoping to do a pistol course this year, but my schedule is so maxed out, I am pretty much limiting myself to things that are directly related to projects I am actively working on right now, aka I re-read "Broken Angels" by Richard K Morgan on the flight because it is the most bad ass scifi/mercenary story ever written. Takeshi Kovacs is probably my favorite character in modern science fiction followed closely(and maybe surpassed by) Neal Asher's Ian Cormac. Both are ruthles killers. One works for himself and the other for AI masters. Both kill people a plenty :)

I received a copy of the Akira 2019 Mechanix book from my amigo, Takafumi Matsubara today. I can't wait to soak it up. I've been on a bit of an Akira resurgance in case you hadn't noticed. I also managed to track down a few of the trades that Dark Horse released. I actually had purchased them all but 3 copies got lunched en route to my door step(or rather weren't adequately described by the sellers...sigh...mail order) :\

Cat Shit One
One of my older favorite manga is a book called Cat Shit One. I just discovered that the creator, Motofumi Kobayashi, has been at it again and released Cat Shit One '08. I also discovered that a mini-series is being produced roughly based on this work and will hit in winter 09.

More to come.

Research

Saw Watchmen last week. Bought the soundtrack on Monday. Loved it. One thing I never really grasped before, was that it's not a hero movie in the traditional sense. It's a group of vigilantes and one super human. The whole office went and enjoyed it. We spent at least 3 hours talking about it post-theater and on Monday we added that and Dark Knight Returns to the company library :-D

After watching Akira on Blu-Ray I've decided to go back and re-read the manga again. I have the entire run that was done by Marvel Comics subsidiary Epic from way back in the day as well as one of the hardcover reissues by Graffiti. I've heard recently that I should check out the Dark Horse versions as the translations are better, but alas they are long out of print. Akira was the first book I read that spanned more than 5-10 issues and held my attention the entire time. The detail with which Otomo rendered the world of 2019 Neo-Tokyo is still unrivaled IMHO. It's also the standard against which I judge my own work. On a side note, in a spirit of the moment otaku product sweep, I lucked into a cherry copy of Akira Mechanix 2019. I am eagerly awaiting my copy in the mail.

I just finished the book "One Soldier's War in Chechnya" by Arkady Babchenko. This the tail end of a research project I did on Chechnya which included a lot of ugly ugly stuff. I read pieces from every angle, strategic, humanitarian, separatist, federalist, etc. Working on BPRE I've really been educated up on my Central Asia/Middle East history. I'll post more of my reading lists here shortly for those who are interested. I read quite a lot ^_^;

After creating drafts of 4 maps for BPRE I'm switching gears and doing a pass on the RoninSVC social network portion of BPRE this week. Over the past few months Phil spent a significant portion of his time researching and studying games on Facebook and MySpace where we learned a whole lot about what works and what doesn't in social network gaming. While it's not a 1:1 analogue, we've made a few additions and a extractions that streamline the user experience. Go Go Echelon Software ^_^;

On another note, after spending some time tearing draft 1 to pieces I'm going to Fayetteville to start draft 2 on the screenplay for the graphic novel next week. Have a better one.

I never liked heroes

In case you didn't know, Black Powder actually started as 2 short stories I wrote in 2002. They were science fiction in nature but basically dealt with the exact same subject material, contractors fighting proxy wars.

About 6 months ago we were asked to do a treatment of BPRE set only 10 years out versus 40. We produced a "scriptment" that was about 60 pages long. This piece was faithful to the BPRE universe but with hooks for a more conventional setting. I've since begun work on second draft of the screenplay with a graphic novel format in mind.

I poked around the net and checked out a few scripts recommended by the fine folks at the Joe Kubert School. Alan Moore is the man to beat apparently. I like quite a few of Moore's books (notable favs are The Watchmen and The Killing Joke) but comparing his written word versus what's on the page is interesting. His scripts read as though he is having a conversation with the artist. Totally not my style LOL But going back to my fav books of the past 3 decades and compiling a top 10 list, the only hero book on there was Dark Knight Returns.

I think I am in the minority of comic book fans in that I have never really liked "hero" books. I got my start in manga, hording Area 88, Grey, Appleseed, Venus Wars and Akira like they were going out of style. I think the first western comics I got into were the 2000AD titles like Rogue Trooper, Bad Company, Judge Dredd and later Glimmer Rats.

I didn't even check out hero books till I was in high school. I mean seriously, dudes in costumes fighting criminals...they weren't heroes. The guys who died at Desert One, heroes. Son Tay Prison Raiders...heroes. You get the drift.

Does this observation have any particular relevance in the greater scheme of things? Who knows. It'll give you an idea of what's on the horizon though :)

Have a better one.