Once you install send me an email or PM on facebook so I can activate your account. We're still improving functionality and optimizing load times, etc. If you do play, do me a favor and send us some feedback or post in the discussion boards.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Invincible Gate Mind of the Infernal Fire Hell
I almost forgot, the new Hayaino Daisuki has landed after almost 2 years ^O^
27 February, 2010
We're in beta 3 of facebook Black Powder | Red Earth rpg. We're planning on releasing chapter 2 as part of beta 4 later this week. If all goes well, we will probably open it up and release chapter 3 a few days after that. I just did a new pass on the art to make sure everything was up to snuff and the color tuning was just what we wanted.
It has been a humbling and illuminating experience producing this game. We'll continue to release content for it throughout the year and potentially prototype some gameplay that could be explored further in a 3D actualization of the game. All the push to get the facebook game baked and out of the oven has pushed my work on the comic book to the side, but maybe for the best.
I had the opportunity to interview an individual who was able to sit me down, run through my scenario, give a few pointers and then design a realistic chain of events around the premise. It's given a lot of new ideas that can be exploited in the RPG down the line. Speaking of the premise have you seen:
In other news, just finished Mass Effect 2, which I vastly preferred to ME, which I honestly got sick of within 2 hours of playtime. ME2 reminds me a lot of Deus Ex (note DEx is easily one of my top 5 games of all time, up there with Syndicate, Mercenaries and Radiant Silvergun).
Also got a chance to see "Shutter Island" this week. I picked up the soundtrack as soon as I got home. While browsing I added Clint Mansell's "Moon". I've been a fan since I heard his work in "The Fountain". Both are killer for solemn moody atmosphere. Been switching between those and the Rosenfeld demos as my soundtrack to this week's creative apocalypse.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
3 posts in one day
And I wanted to quickly add, while I really enjoyed the game play of MW2...I really couldn't get over how ridiculous the story was. Not to mention the lack of dedicated servers on PC and the hordes of obnoxious Xbox Live users have got me to put the game down(for good maybe?) after only 2 months. I played CODMW for almost 2 years, despite the hackers...
Then again, 10 million in sales doesn't lie. Sigh.
After years and years of work
Black Powder | Red Earth is almost here. The facebook rpg is playable start to "finish" and we're working on tweaks/tuning and extra features. After working on this specific project for almost 8 years now, it's amazing that there is still more polish, tweak, edit and learn.
There's been so many iterations and so much hard work put in by so many people including but not limited to and in no specific order:
John Zinn
Travis Haley
Kane Smith
Markus Eslitzbichler
Byungju Kang
Ed Chow
Tim Tracy
Mark Gilson
The good people at Alias who fronted us Maya 7 for our UE3 work
The fine folks at Epic Games who gave us a shot with the UE3 toolset
It's funny to think we started as a Half Life 2 single player mod, became a UT2004 multiplayer mod, continued on to a UE3 then totally switched gears to a Facebook RPG(when we couldn't get any publisher backing/support for a dedicated PC product) and are now starting to explore what the next steps will be after we release the facebook game! Not to mention we started as a jungle warfare game, went to Mars and are now back on Earth 10 years in the future?! Yes...it's been a hell of a ride.
Thanks for hanging in there ^_^
I wrote this for Metal Maniacs sometime ago...
For a feature they ran called death match. It was never published and I was never paid, so here it is. Enjoy :)
Speed freaks are a funny bunch.
First there was Kiss. They screamed and played fast. Then there was AC/DC. They played faster and more distorted. Oh, and the guitar player was insane. Motorhead followed. They were the fastest and heaviest thing on wheels until I was introduced to DRI and Slayer by the kid's who were smoking behind the Library at the tender young age of 12. On hearing Reign in Blood a few years later, I thought, "How can it get any faster short of playing the records at 78 RPM?" A favorite past time of mine for many years (Hey Ricky Bobby wanted to go fast. So did I >o<)
Enter Napalm Death, Repulsion, Carcass, Anal Cunt and 7 Minutes of Nausea. Most people, even the punk/hardcore/metal kids I knew, didn't have the bandwidth for these bands. Throttle down, distortion on and 6-20 minutes later it was over. Like Son Tay raiders, they were audacious, violent and at the top of their game. The ultra-compact, stripped down mission statement of "Reign in Blood" was turned into a stand-alone genre where raw emotion was pushed out through guitars, drums and vocals as fast as humanly possible.
Bands recorded the takes live, complete with mistakes, because there are no mistakes when you are locked on dodonpachi style. "Mistakes" are a invention of producers looking to make pop hits. Perfection has nothing to do with the frayed racket of humanity that is grind. When I am lost in a grind song, it's probably the most honest I'll ever be with myself because ego doesn't matter. It's not about me, even though nothing else will ever be more about me. It's the black box that survives the plane crash and shares it's last moments with you over and over again.
And then, there's the physical side.
When I was in Discordance Axis and it came time to do a new record or a show, Da5e Witte would give up his vices(drinking beer mostly). I would start running, cycling and riding down the road in my car screaming along with SOB, volume maxed out and windows rolled down. And then there are the guitar guys...
Last time I was in Japan, I stayed with Takafumi Matsubara(GridLink, Hayaino Daisuki, Mortalized) who's day starts by having his morning tea &toast while playing a million miles and hour for like 20 minutes to warm up so he can start playing "fast". Before I met Bryan Fajardo(Noisear, Kill the Client, GridLink), I heard stories about him showing up to play Noisear shows, doing his set and then just locking himself in a room to practice blast beats for hours on end.
Like I said earlier.. Ricky Bobby motherfucker.
Finally, there is the creativity. It takes someone special to create records that are essentially one beat the whole way through but still have nuance and form. Music with structure that is built like an SR-71, that is to say it can only be appreciated when it is cruising at mach 3 several miles above the ground.
Many musicians want to mix it up. I say, mixing it up got us rap metal. Enough said. Grind requires a unique talent to manipulate, control and engage at warp speed, creating subtle variations, shifts and sometimes abrupt changes without ever letting off the acceleration.
There is no other form of music, and I love a whole lot of different kinds of music, that is as challenging to get right but more rewarding when it is right, than grind.
I want to go fast. God damn it.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
November already
Time has really blown by this year and things seem to be finally coming to fruition with Black Powder | Red Earth, the facebook game. Most of the images have been post processed and I'm building templates for use in the production front end by Altay. It's unbelievably satisfying to see something come of this property after so much blood and sweat.
Right now, I feel pretty good that release one will be a unique experience among the hordes of facebook games and we're hoping to elevate that next year to something more resembling some of the recent entries into the RPG space. It's a strange journey to go from working on an FPS for almost 6 years (starting as a mod all the way up to actually working with a legit dev kit) and now transitioning to a role play format but really, this is where our strengths lie.
The multiplayer game, which we are still iterating on, will likely see release some day, but there's so much polish and shine to the game play alone needed before that day will come. Not to mention, we've taken a honest look at what a game about our subject matter would be composed of...and it's more Deus Ex than Call of Duty, ie a totally different experience from the run and gun TST style missions in the BPRE multiplayer game ^_^;
Meanwhile, I've got some ideas on how to spin up a rapid prototype tool for a choice/result based system ala some of the Bioware games. We'll hopefully explore that next year.
We've also been working on a prologue video piece with Tim Tracy. Yes, that Tim Tracy. We have such a complex back story for the game that we wanted to communicate with the players, it was a challenge to widdle it down to a core time line of relevant events and then figure out a stylish presentation that would actually hook someone versus alienate them with a lot of Arabic names and history. It's not the "documentary" we had originally wanted to do, but when one has no $, one gets creative ^_^;
Speaking of creative, between hammering through the lyrics to a new GridLink and planning the art/layout for "Orphan". I've also begun work on the new story arc for the BPRE universe entitled Black Powder | Grey Skies. This content will first appear in the facebook game and then hopefully, as a novel based on the same content. I already have a working outline and some characters, but there's a lot to work out. I can say that the story in Grey Skies is actually the events that lead up to the stuff in Red Earth.
But I'm not getting involved in another book until I finish this record ^o^
In other news, I've been playing Modern Warfare 2 on 360...and while I really love it. The lack of dedicated servers really, really sucks. I can see it in the kill cams. I bean a guy in the melon and he head shots me instead. I watch the kill cam and not only did I not fire, the shooter emptied a mag into me. Sigh. Also really hate some of the new perks. Heart beat sensors and turrets have no place in these games. Some of the maps are really great, but I'm not sure if I will remain engaged with the MP as long as I did for MW1.
The single player experience was really well crafted, I especially enjoyed the bits in South America, but overall...I was left unsatisfied with the story. It's...terrible. I may suffer from some serious suspension of disbelief issues because of our background on BPRE but this game has the worst story I've suffered through since Halo 2. It's like they built all the levels and then, Harmony Gold/Robotech style, tried to tie everything together and then add a series of, what can only be described as, fucking idiotic twists at the end. The only positive I got from it, was that it inspired the ending for Grey Skies in a way so starkly contrasting what you get at the end of MW2...I'll leave it to your imagination until I can get it down in ASCII for public distribution^_^
I also picked up and played Flashpoint 2 on Xbox360 and have been playing with ARMA II at the office. I say playing with ARMA II because it's more of a toy than a game. So much shit is broken in it, I enjoy just trucking around and seeing some of the capabilities that were included with the product. Flashpoint 2 is also, not without it's own bugs, but it was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it enough to buy the expansion pack and spend some time in co-op online...which of course made the transition to MW2, all the more painful. New controls, new expectations of weapon performance, etc.
When I finish with MW2 I think I will pick up Dragon Age...not sure if I will go PC or console with it...probably PC since it's $25 cheaper on that platform ^_^;
Happy holidays!
Right now, I feel pretty good that release one will be a unique experience among the hordes of facebook games and we're hoping to elevate that next year to something more resembling some of the recent entries into the RPG space. It's a strange journey to go from working on an FPS for almost 6 years (starting as a mod all the way up to actually working with a legit dev kit) and now transitioning to a role play format but really, this is where our strengths lie.
The multiplayer game, which we are still iterating on, will likely see release some day, but there's so much polish and shine to the game play alone needed before that day will come. Not to mention, we've taken a honest look at what a game about our subject matter would be composed of...and it's more Deus Ex than Call of Duty, ie a totally different experience from the run and gun TST style missions in the BPRE multiplayer game ^_^;
Meanwhile, I've got some ideas on how to spin up a rapid prototype tool for a choice/result based system ala some of the Bioware games. We'll hopefully explore that next year.
We've also been working on a prologue video piece with Tim Tracy. Yes, that Tim Tracy. We have such a complex back story for the game that we wanted to communicate with the players, it was a challenge to widdle it down to a core time line of relevant events and then figure out a stylish presentation that would actually hook someone versus alienate them with a lot of Arabic names and history. It's not the "documentary" we had originally wanted to do, but when one has no $, one gets creative ^_^;
Speaking of creative, between hammering through the lyrics to a new GridLink and planning the art/layout for "Orphan". I've also begun work on the new story arc for the BPRE universe entitled Black Powder | Grey Skies. This content will first appear in the facebook game and then hopefully, as a novel based on the same content. I already have a working outline and some characters, but there's a lot to work out. I can say that the story in Grey Skies is actually the events that lead up to the stuff in Red Earth.
But I'm not getting involved in another book until I finish this record ^o^
In other news, I've been playing Modern Warfare 2 on 360...and while I really love it. The lack of dedicated servers really, really sucks. I can see it in the kill cams. I bean a guy in the melon and he head shots me instead. I watch the kill cam and not only did I not fire, the shooter emptied a mag into me. Sigh. Also really hate some of the new perks. Heart beat sensors and turrets have no place in these games. Some of the maps are really great, but I'm not sure if I will remain engaged with the MP as long as I did for MW1.
The single player experience was really well crafted, I especially enjoyed the bits in South America, but overall...I was left unsatisfied with the story. It's...terrible. I may suffer from some serious suspension of disbelief issues because of our background on BPRE but this game has the worst story I've suffered through since Halo 2. It's like they built all the levels and then, Harmony Gold/Robotech style, tried to tie everything together and then add a series of, what can only be described as, fucking idiotic twists at the end. The only positive I got from it, was that it inspired the ending for Grey Skies in a way so starkly contrasting what you get at the end of MW2...I'll leave it to your imagination until I can get it down in ASCII for public distribution^_^
I also picked up and played Flashpoint 2 on Xbox360 and have been playing with ARMA II at the office. I say playing with ARMA II because it's more of a toy than a game. So much shit is broken in it, I enjoy just trucking around and seeing some of the capabilities that were included with the product. Flashpoint 2 is also, not without it's own bugs, but it was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it enough to buy the expansion pack and spend some time in co-op online...which of course made the transition to MW2, all the more painful. New controls, new expectations of weapon performance, etc.
When I finish with MW2 I think I will pick up Dragon Age...not sure if I will go PC or console with it...probably PC since it's $25 cheaper on that platform ^_^;
Happy holidays!
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