The Monk's Brew

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 screen. Jason will be there for commentary and Q&A after the film. Since SLC has a fairly strong IT community, I hope to [More...]

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 which are around the same time in the fall.

I have no particular interest in the topics of GDC Online, so that’s a conference [More...]

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 to go on initially aside from a short description:

The youngest of those who remain, Lucca joined the monastery only a few short months ago. The

[More...]

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 decided to make the leap and bought myself a tax-free Mac Mini. It’s a bottom-of-the-line model, although the specs have reached the point where they [More...]

Adventures with NPCs Redux: Constantin

Rubes — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 04:28:09 +0000

We continue on with 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 Matteo, the oldest monk at the monastery; the second character we tackled was Constantin, who had some interesting and unique challenges of his own.

We started out with a very general picture of Constantin; he’s middle-aged, a handyman around the monastery (he was a former blacksmith), and a notably large man with a short temper. Again, we didn’t have a lot of text to go on initially aside from a short description (which was actually removed from the game prior to the final release):

An enormous, hulking man, Constantin is taking the lack of food worse than the rest of the brothers. The former blacksmith has taken to

[More...]

IndieCade Submissions Open; Panic Ensues

Rubes — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 04:29:56 +0000

Another year, another indie game festival deadline.

IndieCade, the International Festival of Independent Games that takes place each year in the fall, is now open for submissions for the 2010 event. The deadline for submissions is June 1st, which means we have less than two months to whip Vespers into shape — or at least into enough shape that it doesn’t embarrass itself in the weight room.

I’ve never been to the event, but a number of notable games have been recognized the past couple of years during the festival. Last year’s finalists included Brenda Braithwaite’s Train, Tale of Tale’s The Path, Hemisphere Games’s Osmos, and even an IF game, Jim Munroe’s Everybody Dies. In 2008, Amanita Design’s beautiful Machinarium was the Aesthetics winner, while Jason Roher’s Gravitation took the Jury Award. So I think it’s safe to say that IndieCade has done a nice job in the recent past [More...]

Adventures with NPCs Redux: Matteo

Rubes — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 22:12:59 +0000

Things have been moving forward lately with our NPC development, which has been a very gratifying experience. Watching a character go from a text description to a fully animated and speaking NPC model is something else. And as we move from one character to the next, incorporating each into the game, the whole project really starts to come to life. It sure as hell beats plugging away night after night on the nuances of text parsing.

It takes a lot of steps to go from point A to point B, and a number of people to make it happen, so I thought it might be interesting to review the procedure we went through for each NPC in the game. Vespers has six NPCs: five brothers and one village girl. This way, we can introduce each character while providing a little insight into our development process.

Matteo was the first character [More...]

Looking Back, Looking Ahead

Rubes — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 04:10:18 +0000

We’ve been making some good progress lately on Cecilia, the last of the six NPCs to be implemented in the game, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to bring back the old NPC introductions. This was something I started a long time ago — well before starting this blog, back when I was blogging only on GarageGames. The idea was to write an introduction to each of the characters in the game, showing their development from concept drawing to a fully modeled, animated, and voice-acted 3D NPC. I got through the first two characters, Matteo and Constantin, fairly early on. But as animation problems surfaced (and resurfaced), work slowed down. I was able to get to Lucca and Ignatius eventually, but that was about it. I did finally get Drogo implemented after a long delay, but never did get around to his introduction.

At last, all six [More...]

End of March Vespers Update (or, How To Drop A Girl)

Rubes — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 04:29:04 +0000

March comes, March goes. Lion, lamb, all the usual stuff.

March is always a busy month, what with GDC and sundry work-related conferences and travels. And this year, of course, there was PAX East. Man, how I wanted to be there for that. It was, by still rare accounts, an amazing show of force by the IF community, and from what I can tell a great time was had by all. It sounds like there was a groundswell of new or renewed interest in IF, which can only be a Good Thing. And, of course, GET LAMP. I can’t help but feel like I missed a significant event in IF and the opportunity to meet some great folks, but at the same time I am excited that it occurred and grateful that there are those who could make something like that happen.

Making things happen is a good [More...]

iPad Games They’d Love To See

Rubes — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 21:54:46 +0000

Spotted on CrunchGear.com:

From the web site:

“Planetfall – One of the original Infocom classics. Listen: the iPad has a usable keyboard and can support external keyboards. Why not slap together an Infocom pack for $2 and sell some imagination to these whippersnappers. Who’s with me?”

Not bad, at least it’s good to see some people interested in seeing classic IF on the new device. Of course, it would have made sense to mention the fact that IF already exists on the iPhone platform (see iPhone Frotz) with an inexhaustable supply of excellent pieces, but I’m okay with that.

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