What's All This Then? An Update!

So it has been a bit since my last update... Work on Miskatonic has been put on hold at the moment and while I still love the project and the idea of it two things are hindering my work on it. A) Full time employment, and while I love working to pay bills and such I'd rather be working on Miskatonic but I would rather eat more B) I've started work on a project with a few guys that I went to school with tentatively being called Project Whitehat. With some influences from William Gibson and Frozen Synapse it is a top down shooter based in what I feel represents Gibson's cyberspace. We'll see how things pan out and I'll post some pics a bit later on.

Assets III: Organics

Organic shapes have never been something of a strong suit for me so today I decided to step out of my comfort and model some tentacles, after all who can have anything based on the Cthulhu mythos and not include some form of slimy creepy tentacles? While I'm not at all impressed with the texture I did or the model as a whole, the concept and the idea are taking shape and I've learned a bit more in 3DS Max doing it so I'm sure this is something that is going to be revisited again and dome more and more, but for now here are some shots of the tentacle and trap door I did this morning.

Assets, Mk II.

I've spent the week working on some more assets for Miskatonic and am getting more and more the hang of 3DS Max. Still not doing anything overly complicated with it and still aren't completely happy with everything that I'm producing but it is starting to get there and I am becoming a bit more comfortable with it and with how to texture the models after putting them into UDK. I've been using a program/plugin for Photoshop called xNormal which so far has done amazing work with every texture I've thrown at it to create a normal map for. Some of the following shots I'm really happy with, the books and the Lament Configuration, others not so much, the trophy and lockers for example. I believe they will be getting revisited later on.

Assets

I'm going to preface this post with A 3D modeler I am not, there not that that is out of the way, I've been working on some assets for Miskatonic University because open empty halls and rooms are well, boring. I've starting to grasp 3D Studio Max a bit more confidently than I had in the past but I'm still working with very basic primitive shapes and minor modifications to them. Textures in 3DSM are starting to come along but I still run into issues with UDK not wanting to import them correctly, I think I've finally figured a way around it which has worked once, I've had other methods work once for me and never again in the past however so it still remains to be seen how well this method holds up. Below are some of the few things that I've modeled so far.

A nice dark imposing desk

Curious about what's behind the door?

Trying to keep a 1920s feel to all of the assets, found a few locker types this one seemed the most flexible.

Miskatonic University Update 2

So it has been a little over two weeks since my last update, got to start keeping this thing updated a bit more, which may have become a bit easier now. On the one side of things loosing a job is never easy on anyone, but it gives me time to work on my portfolio and money isn't terrible at the moment. So I've been busy working on Miskatonic and running around some other back burner ideas in my head. I think I've finally gotten the normal map issue with the textures sorted out. I started using a program called Normalx (Thanks for pointing me in this direction Jeremiah) and it seems not only to do a much better job than the nvidia plugin I was using but it is a lot more straight forward as well.

So without further ado some updated Miskatonic University shots.

Front entrance, not completely happy with that concrete texture.
I think I need something lighter here

Looking in the front door.

A look down the first floor corridor.

Second floor, just some work lights in place.

A look down into the library from the third floor balcony.

Over view shot. Still missing some floors and the clocktower.

Small Update, Large Rant

So a quick update on the Miskatonic University project, I ran into a bit of a wall in designing the second floor of the University. I knew that I wanted to add a library and some science labs but trying to figure out how to lay it out and how the layout would affect the third story's floor plan was giving me some issues. So taking a suggestion from my girlfriend I created a mock up of the University in, of all places, The Sims 3 and was able to work quickly and try a few different floor plans out until I found one I liked. While this probably wasn't the approach that is the most typical in a situation like this it did allow me to design quickly and see results of ideas rapidly it seemed to work well. So hopefully I'll have more of the University laid out tonight with some more screen shots as things start to fall into place.

If you're just here for design insights, now is probably a good place to stop reading. While the following will be regarding the gaming industry and gaming culture it does not pertain to design.

Look, I know you're safe and secure behind your screen and your anonymity and that's fine, that's one of the wonders of the internet, it gives everyone a voice. But too many male gamers and males in general use their anonymity for saying disgusting things towards women that they either may know or just pick at random because they can. When did having a screen and the internet between you and the person that you're talking to on the other end of it give you an excuse to act like a misogynistic asshat? I'd say you're a grown man and that you should know better but clearly by your actions you're not and you don't. So let me spell this out for you, treat people like they’re person and not a piece of meat. Just because you have the security blanket of the internet around you doesn't give you a reason or excuse to act like some frat house drunk jackass. My parent taught me to respect human beings as human beings no matter their race, gender, sexual preference or what breakfast cereal they eat in the mornings.

The gaming community is especially bad about this, along with treating women terribly; the bigoted speech that comes through on games is insane. There's a reason I don't play a lot of FPS's online and when I do I have the voice chat muted or when I play an MMO I create custom chat channels that usually avoid the public channels. It’s because not only do I not want to hear the torrent of hate speech that comes out of most of the chat but it’s also because it makes me uncomfortable. I don't fall into any of the categories that should be offended by this speech, I'm a straight white male, but the fact that the words that I would never in my life even think to say are thrown around so easily and freely makes me no longer want to associate myself with a game where that kind of speech is rampant.

I'm not here to point fingers at a cause of this, it could be societal, it could be bad parenting, it could be just a screwed up individual, but the fact remains that nowhere is it acceptable. The gaming industry in the past has, and in some cases still does, employ "booth babes" women who have no problem with guys drooling over them. But as we move away from the idea that games are for children and towards being a multi-billion dollar industry that wants to take itself as seriously as the film industry, it is time to move away from childish things. It is time to let your game sell itself and not need some skimpily clad woman to stand by your game to get attention for what you've been doing. If you need that sort of marketing it seems to me that maybe it’s time to go back and rework your game until it can sell itself.

Miskatonic University Update 1

I've done a bit of work on Miskatonic University recently and figured I was far enough along to show a few in progress images. It isn't anything major yet but the first floor is laid out and I've begun experimenting with some over all textures, I'm happy with the floor texture the red brick texture needs some work, the normal mapping is giving me some strange black outlines. Anyhow on to the images!

Shot from inside looking down the main hall.

Shot from outside looking up the front steps

Overall aerial shot

First floor layout

Diablo 3 & Game Motivation

With the release of Diablo 3 earlier this year Blizzard/Activision answered the dreams of gamers for the past 12 years. Unfortunately it seems that dream is slowly spiraling down into a nightmare. When Diablo 3 was released gamers surged through the content at a pace that was at best unexpected. Through the increasing difficulties and gear drops the world first Inferno mode Diablo kill came just over a month after the game's release, despite complaints among players about hitting a wall and having to farm for hours to find gear needed to progress.

While recently there have been patches and additions to the game there has been a lot of public backlash against Blizzard with the way that not only the game has been handled but from public statements made by some of Blizzard's employees and a mess with overzealous forum suspensions. While these things don't directly affect game play they reflect badly upon the way that Blizzard has handled the fallout of poor game motivations and bad game balance.

When designing a game there are specific motivators that keep gamers playing. Content, challenge, rewards and story, each of these come together to create and experience for players that should be engaging and rewarding, Diablo 3 is an example of how when one or any of these aspects is missing the game feels incomplete or at best broken.

Let's start by taking a look at how Diablo 3 addressed content within the game. I played through Diablo 3 on the beginning normal mode, through all four acts and finished it at sometime under 19 hours. Including the time it took to farm the items needed to unlock the hidden area "Whimsyshire", and I thoroughly enjoyed the time it took me to run through the game the first time through. However Diablo 3 is setup so that once the game has been completed on normal mode the next tier difficulty unlocks and the player is asked to play the game again, their only rewards for doing so being better gear and harder creatures to fight. This harder tier adds absolutely no new content for the player to experience and for those people, like myself, who play games to see the content that was created have no motivation to continue playing.

Diablo 3's challenge aspect is something that worked early on in the game, normal and nightmare modes were fair, the challenge ramp up through the acts felt even and smooth and there were times that when I died it felt frustrating at points but never did it feel like it was an unfair death. I always felt that if I approached a situation or particular fight differently that I was able to overcome it and move on and 90% of the time that was absolutely correct. Never was there a point where I felt like I had hit a brick wall and could not progress. As the later difficulty ranks of Diablo 3 were unlocked, hell and inferno, that no longer became the case. Players now need to spend hours and hours collecting drops in hopes that something that would increase their stats enough for them to move forward would drop so that they could progress.

Loot drops have become the reason to continue playing Diablo 3 for many gamers. The reward of finally being able to move to act two or three of Inferno mode so that they can continue to grind for different items and collect new rewards is the biggest motivator of continued play from people that I know still playing the game. While there are several reward systems in Diablo 3 including gear, gold, and with the addition of the Real Money Auction House, income it seems that this was the focus of the development team over many of the other aspects of the game. The primary and main motivator of Diablo 3 has become the reward system which when looking for that "perfect" item in and of itself is a poor motivator. The chances of a item dropping that has perfect stats for a player is an abysmal 0.0000343%, and while there are hundreds if not thousands of pieces of gear that drop through a play through of all four acts you still end up with an extremely low probability that the piece the player is looking for will drop. I'm certain that this is an intentional move on Blizzard's to push players to spend money at the Real Auction House, which Blizzard takes a cut of.

Lastly people play games for the story; this is something unfortunately where I believe Blizzard has failed completely at. The story behind Diablo 3 is, to use and overused phrase, cookie-cutter at best. The location types used in Diablo 3 are almost exactly the same location types used in Diablo 2 in almost exactly the same order. The characters are flat; lacking any real traits they are almost impossible for the player to be empathetic to. Even the big "twist" towards the end of the game seemed predictable and the final confrontation feels anti-climatic.

Personally I think that Diablo 3 had the capability of being an excellent game if it had taken a more traditional approach to content progression by making the player grind throughout the game content for gear that they needed and an overall progression of difficulty through the story instead of asking the player to run through the same content four times with increased difficulty while playing through the same content.