Scout Update Excitement

Is anyone else really excited about the imminent Scout Update for Team Fortress 2 yet? I know I am.

Soon, I'll finally FINALLY get the Does It Hurt When I Do This? and You'll Feel A Little Prick achievements for my Medic. Possibly Big Pharma and other assist-based achievements too.

The Tech Demo

Marc and I are hard at work on the Tech Demo for Steam City Chronicles this week. More news on that next monday.

The rest of Mission 9 have already produced some pretty good stuff, and I'm confident the game is going to look and sound sweet.

In the meantime, until I have something of substance to post, I may post a video or two.

Gordon Babcock's Series of Unfortunate Events

In a recent letter written as part of a court case, Gordon Babcock wrote:

In short, I have been shut out of my children's lives by a serious [sic] of very unfortunate events.

I wish to put forth a rebuttal to this claim. 

THIS is A Series of Unfortunate Events:

In this series of books written by the pseudonymous Lemony Snicket, a group of children must endure various bad situations, many of which are directly or indirectly made much worse by their elder relative "Count Olaf". Olaf's disdain for his relatives and lust for money is only eclipsed by his ability to act in the opposite manner and feign victimhood if called on it. He dons a variety of disguises, occasionally dressing as a woman, and is such a good actor that he often is able to fool the many adults he comes in contact with. These adults are often mystified as to why the children don't trust Olaf, and it's because Olaf doesn't even bother acting nice to them; instead making it very clear to them that he's after their inheritance money in a Richard III way and he'll never stop until he gets it.

Not all of the childrens' troubles are directly caused by Olaf, but it seems that whenever the opportunity arises for Olaf to make their lives more difficult, he'll jump at the chance. He's also guilty of many more horrible things besides what he's done to them, but has managed to avoid prosecution for it. Each story ends with the children just barely escaping complete ruin (usually at least partly caused by Olaf) and moving onto the next bad-and-about-to-get-worse-partly-or-entirely-because-of-Olaf situation.

When looked at in this light, it is plain to see that Gordon Babcock's choice of words is far, far, far, far, far more appropriate than he possibly could have realized at the time he wrote them. 

What I've been doing instead of posting here

Although I have been posting here at least twice a week, which is pretty good for me, I've been even busier over on the Game Design Guild forums.

This is mainly because the Game Design classes at CCC use the GDG forums to communicate to the rest of the team, but also because some interesting stuff has been happening.

The Word on The Streets forum is a new forum that's basically all about free stuff to get: mostly free Indie games, but other stuff as well.

GD2 Meeting 3

Well we had another meeting yesterday. This is probably the last time I'm going to do an update for a class / meeting for several reasons it's probably best to avoid mentioning online.

Each of the Game Design classes has their own team name. Each team has their own private forums. These are theoretically used to help teams communicate well while they make their games.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions as to why I used the word "theoretically".

Despite... hiccups... we are making decent progress. We're keeping the name of the game the same.

GD2 Class 3

We had our third class yesterday. Not a lot to talk about, because we have a pretty solid idea of how the game is going to work, what characters are going to feature in the plot, the setting, the weapons & gadgets, etc. The GDD assignments were handed out and we're working on the GDD and tech demo.

Marc got a sprite to move around and follow the mouse in class from scratch. Tech Team rules!

Steam City Chronicles (or whatever the final name will be) will kick ass.

EDIT 2: Edited out a sentence and a word to spare some peoples' sensitive feelings. We wouldn't want person x to punch person y in the throat because person z didn't realize person x was cranky about subject n.

GD2 Meeting 2

We had our second meeting today. The story and features of the game are pretty fleshed out now. Not a whole lot else to say for now.

Lots going on behind the scenes, though. I'm hoping we have time to do a behind the scenes doc for the final product.

GD2 Class 2

Monday we had our second class of GD2. It was pretty productive.

There was an incident last week on the Guild forums that was resolved in class. Then we reviewed the Tech Team's PoKs, did some team building exercises and various other stuff.

Nothing terribly exciting yet, but most of the good stuff (so far) happens outside of class anyway, as each team works on the individual parts of the game: Marc and I (the Tech Team) are working on Torque tutorials. I'm working on drafting a document for tomorrow's meeting that will give the Design team a better idea of what kinds of puzzles can be designed. The Art team are figuring out the art, the story is coalescing into something interesting, and the Marketing team have some good ideas for later.

I have a good feeling about the end result of all this. Even if the game itself completely sucks, which I don't think it will, it's definitely good practice for working in a team and eventually making something that's actually pretty good.

Webcomics By Girls

First of all, for those who don't know yet and don't want to go hunting in the archive for clues, I am a guy. I am the sort of guy who occasionally posts videos of cats and other animals to my weblog, but I also like to drink and visit the shooting range and do other manly stuff. XKCD is one of my top favorite webcomics and I understand 98% of it. I used to be in construction. Nevertheless, I have been reading a lot of webcomics by girls/ladies/women (whatever the cartoonist thinks is appropriate) lately.

The latest one, which I just discovered a couple minutes ago, is Sketchfervor. Like most of the comics I read, I found it by clicking on an ad in another comic (so if you want me to visit your comic, the best way is to advertise on a comic I already read). It's a combination of slice-of-life and fantasy and she's not afraid to break the fourth wall and make fart jokes. This anything-goes formula can be a recipe for disaster, but she pulls it off pretty well.

One I've mentioned before is Kate Beaton's (Often Historical) Comics. She's carved out a unique niche for herself by mercilessly making fun of historical figures, her ancestors, and herself. It's usually a lot more intellectual than Sketchfervor: the punchlines are lowbrow, but the setups require a decent knowledge of history and sometimes also geography and science.

Then there's Mr. Never-Updates-His-Site-Anymore's favorite webcomic Narbonic. I've been following the commentary version, as well as Shaenon's new comic Skin Horse, every day. Both series are very, very, geeky with Narbonic having a strong male protagonist and the characters of Skin Horse just being very strange. It's so popular, you probably already read it anyway.

The pioneers of webcomics were all geeky guys because of the tech knowledge requirements to put anything on the web, but lately it's seemed closer to a 50/50 gender ratio for the new comics (there's a bunch more I know about but don't have time to write about). More females getting into entertainment media that have been traditionally too techy/geeky/male dominated is generally a good thing (theater, radio, and film have all been like that in the past). Ada Lovelace would be proud.