Rather than muddling my last post with jabber...

For the first time in a long time, I've been playing lots and lots of video games. Mass Effect 2(enjoyed), Battlefield : Bad Company 2(love the multiplayer - when it works), God of War 3(fun but not the magnum opus the gaming press led me to believe).

ME2 was my first Bioware game. Well the first that I actually played through. I'm not big into the fantasy stuff and I was not a fan of the first ME at all. But ME2 struck a chord with me. I didn't love it in the way that I loved FFVII or Chrono Trigger, but there was definitely a Deus Ex flavor to the game that I really enjoyed. I like the little branches that make my character me, but then again, I never really cared for the characters in the way that I did in FFVII or Chrono Trigger. That might be the nature of the beast though...

There was a really cool video piece on GameTrailers.com where Dave Jaffe, a game journalist(no idea what his name is) and one of the BioWare founders discuss the two ways of selling of story in game. It comes down to: are you playing someone else(Snake, Kratos, Master Chief) or are you playing you(Mass Effect, The Sims, etc.)? Is it a roller coaster or is it a whole theme park? A lot to think about in their comments.

As usual also hitting the theaters a lot.

Shutter Island is probably the darkest thing I have seen in years. It's "twist" ending manages to not undermine the rest of the film, something few twist endings ever seem to pull off for me. The soundtrack is brooding, dark and catastrophic...a perfect match for the film. I purchased it within minutes of leaving the theater. The imagery and performances in this movie are unmatched by anything else I have seen in 2010. I will be buying this day 1 on Blu-Ray.

Green Zone was a movie I was looking forward to and while I enjoyed the texture and artistry of the film, the story veers into opposing traffic and collides head on with nonsense. If you haven't seen the movie, it essentially takes a real event(the US invasion of Iraq), overlays a totally fictional conspiracy on top of it and then presents this conspiracy as though it were a real historical narrative.

This one bothered me.

I'll explain...

The idea of merging reality and fiction is at the heart of many great stories dating back to before Shakespeare. However, when entertainment is presented as truth...is this a responsible act??? Is it a film makers responsibility to tell stories that are truthful or are they just producing entertainment? I'm on the fence on this one, especially with this movie. I'll let you know if I come down one way or another...

Busy month

The BPRE beta is entering month 2. It's amazing how much we've learned and adjusted our initial product to suit life in the great outdoors. Among the various optimizations, UI adjustments, feature tweaks and art changes, there has been one sweeping change that we're still working through. When we did the mission outline and shoot back in July of 2009, it was based on a treatment of a BPRE graphic novel that was near finished draft. We did paper prototypes, designed and produced templates, hooked them up to the app and then let people play with them...

Fast forward to November and MW2. MW2 was an interesting turning point for me as a creator on several levels.

First, it was an amazing roller coaster ride that delivered a level of fidelity and polish, previously unseen in "war" game.

Second, despite great voice acting and graphics, it was one of the most disappointing narratives I've ever experienced. Not to mention, it seemed like every time you turn around in the game someone else was picking up the slack(getting punched out, having ceiling fall on me, someone else catching the bad guy I couldn't seem to catch, grabbing my hand as I missed a jump onto a rope ladder, etc.) or I was outright getting killed. That is, of course, when the developers weren't busy bringing characters back from the dead and undermining all the dramatic sacrifice from the CoDMW single player experience.

After playing MW2(and last year's MGS4), the last thing I wanted was yet another twist ending where the player is betrayed by command or some other war is bad preachy thing.

So I sat down and started over and produced a totally different story, same world and still based on real world operations, but with a whole new spin.

One month later, when the team read the draft, everyone got very excited. From the narrative side, we were suddenly in much darker territory with protagonists who were driving the story rather than being driven by it - aka a "Snow Crash" vs "Neuromancer" approach. The new narrative has more potential for diversity in terms of gameplay in a social network environment(ie it's not jsut shooting people - not that there's anythign wrong with that).

We started thinking and talking about BPRE in terms of a modern warfare RPG rather than as a modern warfare FPS/action game...

Fast forward two months and Echelon is knee deep in beta .9999999

Our target is far different than when we started, but we're going with it. The creative process is mercurial and it needs to be controlled but it should not be walled in either. Sometimes, you need to re-write and re-shoot. Sometimes you have to work with what you have. Sometimes, it's a little of both.

Armed with a better understanding of what we have in our hands, we're prepping to do a shoot for the next mass of content in about 4 weeks with the latest iteration of the comic series, driving the mission but not the details. It's an exciting time.

Black Powder | Red Earth beta

Released

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.

Invincible Gate Mind of the Infernal Fire Hell

I almost forgot, the new Hayaino Daisuki has landed after almost 2 years ^O^

CD in DVD case with 20 page booklet including 4 page Scratch Trigger Era comic book by Jon Chang, Mark Gilson and Stan Sakai!

New Limited Edition HD Shirt

Kyoto Caffeine Machine Shirt

And finally a new GridLink shirt

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.

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 ^_^