The Monk's Brew

Now We’re Getting Somewhere

Rubes — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 20:41:12 +0000

Well, it certainly has been a while, hasn’t it?

It is fair to say that the general lack of activity on this blog has been directly related to the lack of significant progress on Vespers. While much of that has been due to the inconsiderate intrusion of Real Life on the development process over the past, oh, 18 months or so, a fair share of the stagnation was also due to an unfortunate combination of bad luck, shortsightedness, and an incredibly exasperating game engine.

I’ll conveniently ignore the former stuff, and expand just a bit on the latter.

As I’ve discussed in earlier posts, most of what I’ve been focusing on since last fall (or so) has been the first cutscene, since the demo [More...] Read the rest

All’s Well That Ends Well?

Rubes — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 16:56:25 +0000

Some encouraging news, for a change.

My last post, back in November (really?), discussed how the parent company behind the Torque Game Engine, the engine I’m using for Vespers, was shutting down the portion of the company responsible for engine development. I think a lot of people saw that coming. The original company, GarageGames, was a small, friendly, down-to-earth group of people that had a passion for helping other people make games, and it helped them build a strong game engine and a large, fairly devoted community. The employees spent a good deal of time on the forums interacting with the customers and developers, and this created a nice connection that a lot of people appreciated. Then things started changing. They expanded [More...] Read the rest

Whither (Wither?) Torque

Rubes — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 15:00:24 +0000

Thanks to Rampant Coyote for bringing this to my attention, but for those of you who haven’t heard, InstantAction has decided to shut down its operations. While this is certainly sad news for a number of people who will be out of work, a lot of you are probably saying, “Who?” The truth is that I’m not sure I could accurately explain exactly how this relates to me, even though it does.

About three years ago, GarageGames – the company responsible for developing and selling the Torque Game Engine (TGE), the 3D engine I’m using to make Vespers – announced a ‘partnership’ with InterActive Corporation (IAC), which is just another way of saying that GarageGames was bought out by IAC. The idea, at least as [More...] Read the rest

Who Wouldn’t Be Inspired By This?

Rubes — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 17:56:49 +0000

As some of you may have gathered by now, I like documentaries. And I’m a nerd. So nerd documentaries are like magical gifts from above.

Jason Scott has made two of them, BBS: The Documentary and, of course, GET LAMP, and both are excellent and clearly targeted to my demographic. I think our successful showing in Salt Lake proved that you don’t have to be a total nerd to enjoy them, but truth be told, they’re not for everybody. But courtesy Jason, another film about a subject close to my heart has appeared on the horizon, although this may be old news to some.

Indie Game: The Movie is a feature documentary being made by James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot of BlinkWorks, which covers [More...] Read the rest

Time…Marches On

Rubes — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:07:18 +0000

So last night was the latest Utah Indie Gamer night, and I couldn’t make it. Bums me out a bit, because I enjoy connecting with those folks and following along with some of their projects, especially Jay Barnson’s Frayed Knights. At the same time, though, each successive gathering just seems to highlight the fact that I still haven’t reached any major milestones on this project.

It’s now the end of October, and still no Vespers. Still no demo. Seriously, what gives?

Fine, so four and a half years into the project, I’m willing to admit it’s taking slightly longer than anticipated. It was a struggle to finally reach that conclusion, but there you have it. I thought I was choosing a relatively small, [More...] Read the rest

JET LAMP SLC: A few thoughts about the event…

Rubes — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 07:02:30 +0000

…in no particular order:

1. Loved it. The event went off without a hitch. Brewvies was a great place to have it, especially with the beer and food to go along with the big screen. I was a little worried at first, since it was a pretty large theater with 160 seats, not intuitively conducive to an informal screening and discussion. But seeing the film up on the large screen was very cool, and the post-movie discussion actually worked quite well.

2. This:

was exceptionally cool to see. Not sure why, but this probably made the night. That, and seeing Jason’s reaction to it.

3. Who knew? Taking photographs of a cinema marquee, no big deal. Taking photos of the lingerie and sex shop next [More...] Read the rest

JET LAMP tour stopping in Salt Lake City

Rubes — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 17:30:42 +0000

Well, after taking the summer off from the blog, we’re now officially back in business. And what better way to start back in than with an excellent announcement about Jason Scott’s documentary film on the history of text adventure games, GET LAMP.

Jason is making the rounds during the months of September and October to promote the movie, thanks to a special “all-you-can-jet” ticket through JetBlue airlines. Since JetBlue flies into Salt Lake City, I invited him to stop in for a screening, and he accepted.

The screening will take place at Brewvies Cinema Pub, a cool place in downtown SLC that serves beer and food with movies, so it should make for a great place to see the film on the big [More...] Read the rest

No More GDC Austin

Rubes — Sat, 29 May 2010 22:55:13 +0000

Well, not the usual GDC Austin, at least. It seems that GDC has decided to reformulate (and rename) the former GDC Austin as GDC Online, which is now geared towards “connected games including casual, MMOs, virtual worlds, and social networking games.” So instead of a smaller version of the more general GDC, it’s now focusing primarily on online games.

I’m disappointed, but I think I can understand the move. I really liked having a smaller, more accessible GDC than the big one in San Francisco. It probably makes more sense to have a meeting that focuses on a particular area of game development, rather than just another “mini” GDC, especially with the rise of other conferences and meetings like PAX and IndieCade, both of [More...] Read the rest

Adventures with NPCs Redux: Lucca

Rubes — Sat, 29 May 2010 04:34:27 +0000

Here we resume our efforts to bring our NPCs to life, beginning with bits and pieces of text from the IF version of Vespers and ending with a modeled, animated, and voice-acted 3D character. Last time I discussed the development of Constantin, the large hulking monk with a short temper. This time I relate the development of Lucca, who had some interesting and unique challenges of his own.

Lucca was going to be a tough character to convincingly recreate. He’s the youngest member of the monastery, a teenager who recently joined the order. He’s very attached to Matteo, one of the monastery’s father figures, and is generally an emotional character during the course of the game. Again, we didn’t have a lot of text [More...] Read the rest

Not Your Mother’s Integrated Graphics

Rubes — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:32:19 +0000

One of the things I noticed when I posted the request for beta testers is that a number of interested people didn’t quite have the system specs I believed were needed to run the game smoothly – namely, a dedicated graphics card with a decent amount of video RAM. Systems with integrated graphics chips, at least in my mind, have not traditionally handled fairly intensive 3D games very well, hence the decision to exclude those systems, at least at the start.

That, and I didn’t have access to a decent system with an integrated graphics chip to test the game. That has now changed.

I’ve been wanting to upgrade my little server box for a while now, and with Apple’s recent tax-free sales event, I [More...] Read the rest