The Monk's Brew

Long Live the Animator

Rubes — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:12:49 +0000

You may have noticed (if you’ll allow me the fantasy that anyone is paying attention) that it has been a while since the last Vespers update. This is for many reasons, of course. It might just be easiest to say that it’s because there hasn’t been a whole lot to report. I wish that wasn’t the case, but so it goes.

Most of it, as usual, originates from the animation side of things. What began as a promising venture with three local animation students eventually fizzled out. One of them made a little bit of progress over a long period of time, but couldn’t get much further due to classes and other obligations. Another never really got off the ground. The third did actually get a lot of quality work done in the time we worked together, but life issues with women and career eventually derailed that train, and he faded into obscurity. It was, to be sure, a useful path to follow, as we now have all of our character models essentially working the way they should. But a game like this has a lot of animations to be done, and we’re only a fraction of the way there.

Animation is clearly [More...]

Indie, Part-Time

Rubes — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 23:38:40 +0000

As I was cruising around GDC Austin from one session to the next, I began to gain a greater appreciation of how much of the conference was geared toward the business side of game development. This isn’t surprising, of course, given that game development is an entertainment business, and GDC is all about how developers can do all parts of their jobs better. But whether it’s because of the tough economic times, or the rapid saturation of the iPhone game market, or the wide proliferation of MMOs and social games, or the plummeting price point for online and mobile games, it just seemed like there was a greater emphasis on economics than I experienced last year, unless I’m just forgetting.

There were many sessions at the conference on how to maximize things like productivity, exposure, earning potential, sales, and so on. How to pitch your game to publishers. How to get your game on more portals. How to make a profit while selling games for $1.99 a pop, or less. How to attract players and create communities around your games.

Most of it, at least the parts that I was able to attend, was very good. And much of it targeted the [More...]

Austin GDC Slides

Rubes — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:04:40 +0000

I know a couple of people were interested in seeing the slides I presented at the Austin GDC, so I’ve (finally) made them available for download.

There are two versions available. The slides are available in their native PowerPoint (.ppt) format, as well as in PDF format for those who don’t have access to PowerPoint. The PPT version is preferable, since it contains some of my notes for each slide. I sometimes include slides without much descriptive text on them, so having the notes available will help others to know what I was trying to communicate. For some reason there’s something a little denuding about putting my notes out there with the slides, but so be it.

The PDF file does not contain the notes, since I couldn’t figure out an easy way to do that. But there is this option available for those who cannot open PPT files. (Of course, if you really want the notes and you don’t have PowerPoint, you can always grab OpenOffice.)

I would welcome any comments people have about the slides, so feel free to send them my way. And please let me know if any slides need clarification.

Link to PowerPoint slides (with notes).

Link to PDF slides (without notes).

[More...]

Anticipation II

Rubes — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:17:14 +0000

Back in February of this year, I wrote about an indie game that I was really looking forward to: The Path. The game has since been released, of course, and I would say it was well worth the wait. Not necessarily because it was a great game—as with their earlier piece, The Graveyard, it was less a game than an interactive narrative experience—but because it was a well-crafted work that encouraged and successfully produced a good deal of dialogue about its subject matter and about interactive narrative in general.

Another piece that has been on my radar for some time is Amanita Design’s Machinarium. They’ve been making the rounds for some time now with occasional blog pieces, early pre-order specials, and rare teaser trailers. They even provided those who pre-ordered the game with a special “pre-order pack” consisting of hi-res screenshots and soundtrack previews. So they’ve done a pretty good job of getting the word out and generating some pre-launch interest.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the game won the award for Excellence in Visual Art at the 2009 IGF, or that it was selected for the PAX10 Showcase of Indie Games just a couple of months ago. All signs seem to be pointing to an [More...]

New Host, New Sites

Rubes — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 04:31:51 +0000

For a little while now I’ve been setting up a website for Orange River Studio and Vespers, and I’ve reached the point where it’s pretty much ready to go live. But that also gave me the opportunity to switch from Blogger to WordPress for this blog, and after some testing I think it’s time to make the switch. So the new URL for The Monk’s Brew is now http://orangeriverstudio.com/monksbrew, although I’ve tried to set things up so that the feeds transfer over seamlessly. So there shouldn’t be any need to re-subscribe to the feed, and most links should transfer you over automatically. I’m still learning about this whole process, though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I missed something. If anyone discovers this is the case, by all means let me know.

Although Blogger is nice, I’m really liking WordPress. I’m very impressed with how powerful it is, while still being very easy to learn and use.

The new web site for ORS and Vespers is just http://orangeriverstudio.com/, although http://vespers3d.com/ will also take you there. I had a lot of help creating the site, which was done with Joomla. There is definitely a learning curve with Joomla, but it’s beginning to grow on me.

It’s still very [More...]

Steve’s Cell Phone Number

Rubes — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 02:37:00 +0000

So one of the cooler things that happened at GDC Austin took place at the Speaker’s Party, a nice rooftop patio party for all of the speakers at the conference with, happily enough, an open bar. I was there in Austin by myself, and I’m not the most extroverted person by nature, so mingling at a social event where most people seem to know each other and I know zero isn’t exactly my comfort zone. But hey, open bar.

So I got my precious free drink, scanned the crowd, and tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do next.

I finally saw someone I recognized, but only barely; Tom Abernathy, one of the advisors of the Writers’ Summit. I knew a little of him, but I only recognized him because he introduced me at my talk. I approached him and thanked him for his intro, and we talked briefly about how things went.

It was then that I noticed someone standing next to him. A very tall, bearded man. I didn’t recognize him, but since we needed our speaker’s badges to get into the party, he was wearing his, and I did a quick double-take. It was Steve Meretzky, [More...]

Wrapping Up At the GDC Austin

Rubes — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 19:30:00 +0000

I’m finally getting some time to put some thoughts together on this year’s GDC Austin, as I sit in the airport waiting for my flight back. Luckily, it’s still possible to put some thoughts together, after dumping half a beer on (and in) my laptop last night. I thought for sure that was the end of the line for the MacBook Pro, but it seems to have survived the scare.

It was an impressive amount of beer dumped directly over the power button and right half of the keyboard, and I wasn’t exactly the swiftest to respond. But after giving it some time to dry upside down, it did start up the first time I tried. After that, though, on subsequent power-ups it would only cough and gasp before shutting down. It looked bleak. I’m not sure what did the trick. I gave it one last shot by holding down the power button a little longer than usual; the little power light flickered and the laptop gave a loud, almost alarming BEEP (which I’ve never heard it do before, must have been really pissed at me), and then it started up just fine. Seems to have recovered from its hangover now, [More...]

A Moment To Pause and Catch My Breath

Rubes — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 22:52:00 +0000

Well, that was a bit longer hiatus than I was expecting, but there you have it. It was quite a July and August. Mixed in with an impossible workload, particularly in August, was a couple of vacations (including an awesome backpacking trip to Yosemite National Park, which required more preparation than I had expected) and a big deadline. Yeah, that deadline. It’s amazing, particularly without having children, how easily free time can get sucked away before you realize it. So just about every spare minute I could find was spent working on my presentation, which has left very little time for any Vespers work recently.

I’ve given a lot of scientific talks and lectures before, and it’s pretty rare to have to prepare my talk well in advance. On only a handful of occasions can I remember having to turn in my slides before I gave the talk, which (given my nature) means that I can and do work on the slides right up until the talk itself. Not so in this case, which I can understand for a conference like this. They wanted the slides just under a month before the talk, which is great in theory (they have the slides [More...]

Gulp

Rubes — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:43:00 +0000

This, to be perfectly honest, isn’t something I ever expected to see.

It certainly does make it real. I was hoping to put together something like a panel discussion to take some of the pressure off, but that turned out to be more complicated than I thought. So there it is, and here I am, all jittery and uneasy two months in advance and hoping that I can come up with enough interesting material to justify this trust I’ve been given.

The AGDC Game Writers Summit web page has been updated with most of the sessions, so I have been able to glance at some of the company I have been placed in. Looks like there are some big designers and writers from Valve, Eidos, Sony Online, Red Storm, and Ubisoft. Wonderful. And there are some really interesting talks planned, such as Mary de Marle’s “Redefining Our Role in Crafting Player Driven Narratives”, and Aaron Oldenburg’s “Intuitive Design of Interactive Narrative: The Mischief of Created Things”. Should be very cool, and that’s only the Game Writers summit.

And then, get this, there’s some freak from–wait, where is he from again?–who’s actually going to talk about interactive fiction. No, seriously. It says so right there, [More...]

LucasArts classics on the iPhone?

Rubes — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:05:00 +0000

Not to just parrot another blog entry, but I thought this was interesting. I’m sure most of you are by now familiar with the news that LucasArts is in the process of reviving some of their classic point-and-clickers like Secret of Monkey Island and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis for XBLA and PCs, which is beautiful news indeed.

In addition to this, though, is the report from Joystiq (via TAUW) that we might be seeing some of these classics on the iPhone someday soon. As reported:

…we did get a vague answer in the affirmative (from LucasArts): “On iPhone, you know Apple’s policy that we can’t talk about a release until it’s ready to release. But it would make sense that we would do something like that if we were to go in that direction … wink wink, nod, nod.”

It certainly makes sense, and this would be great to see, although I do have some reservations. Maybe I’m in the minority, but I’m not a big fan of remakes, and it looks like the upcoming Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition is just that, with updated graphics and sound. There’s something I find particularly charming about the pixelated graphics and simplistic sound of the [More...]