Dopass.com

The Final Highway; The Road Home -- how many more silly cliches can I throw? Choppin' Maul was my last season with Auto Assault, the literal winter of my time on the project.

Back during the pre-release days, when Scott gave interviews, he would describe a scenario where players would blow up a dam, flooding a level. He would go on to describe how the same players could return to the site of the dam later, to see it destroyed and to adventure in the ruins of the destroyed dam.

Here's the first bit of trivia for TRNT this week, I wasn't technically the first Human content lead.

Scooby and Shaggy slink towards the kitchen of the creepy old house. As they pass a painting, it is hard not to notice that the eye holes are shaded in an entirely different palette than the rest of the scene. A lighter shade of paint that made it clear to the experienced Scooby-watcher what was to come. See, in all of those early Hanna-Barbera cartoons, anything that was going to animate would be drawn in a lighter color than the backdrop scenes. We knew that a ghostly bad guy was going to peer malignantly at our heroes through the eyes of the painting because the eyes were painted in that 'active element' color. Deliberate or not, it removed any suspense that the Scooby gang tales might have carried.

To name a thing is to... what?
In many myths, to name a thing is to control it. At the very least, knowing the name of a thing, the real name, the name that meant precisely what that thing was, gave someone great power over the thing. Still, plenty don't recall names well at all, especially in stories like those found in movies or books. It might be argued that Shakespeare's characters could be said to imply that names aren't so meaningful after all. Or maybe what's really being said there is, that they are. So, this makes me wonder; Are names important in our games too?

I was thinking today about level in MMORPG's and how one might make level feel like 'character age' or 'potential experience' without precisely defining what said appellation meant in terms of character statistics. To create an interpreted power level and class, and to move away from a strongly defined power level for online world play.

Games development is like a Zen process.

This is a fly piece of hardware.

Even the desire to role play is often looked down on and snickered at within an environment that exists in large part because of role players that came before.

I miss role playing games, and apparently the mainstream MMO fantasy/Hero game has developed into a sort of team sport in thin LARPer guise.

I go off about it in this blog, it's long, be warned.

Apparently David Sirlin, a Producer/Designer in the industry, has penned a Soapbox article over at Gama. I was so taken with his rant that I had to echo a hearty "amen!" to his sentiment and even reprint some quotes here for you folks to hearken to.

The actual article is here, but some of my favorite little bites follow...

I like to start my blogs off with a loud statement, here's today's:

People that do not read the text in video games, as a practice, ought to be barred from games development.

A doozy that one? I think not, and here's why.