GAMBIT

Yay Team!

2009-11-06T21:30:12Z

Finally, here is a team photo so you can see the talented individuals who made Abandon possible.

Come back on Monday for another awesome Game of the Week.

Final Version GDD

2009-11-06T20:15:23Z

Here is the final version of the Abandon GDD.

Final_GDD.pdf

More coming right up!

More Menu Concept Art

2009-11-06T19:27:44Z

Here is another piece of menu screen concept art.

More coming up soon!

Menu Concept Art

2009-11-06T16:00:00Z

Here are some concepts for main menu screens. These are from when the game was titled "Alone."

More coming up later today!

Oops

2009-11-06T14:40:16Z

Here is an interesting early character design I just stumbled upon. It breaks the "rough" chronological order of these postings, but it was too great to ignore. Without further ado, I introduce, Disgruntled Flamethrower Man.

More coming up soon!

Tim Schafer's Metal Metaphysics.

2009-11-05T22:38:16Z

NOTE: I wrote the following immediately after finishing Brutal Legend for the first time. It contains complete story spoilers, so be warned.

Okay, I see how the story works now. Yes, Eddie is from the future. His demon mother traveled to the future--which is apparently our present--and died soon after she had him there. Eddie's belt buckle was a originally a talisman intended to return her to the past if it ever touched her blood. This is, apparently, what we see happening in the opening cinematic. Eddie is crushed by a stage prop, blood splashes on his belt buckle, and suddenly the metal god Ormagoden appears to bring him back to the past (and apparently heal him in the process). This is why Eddie sprouts demon wings during battle scenes, why he wields demon weapons with ease, etc. It all makes sense, was clearly thought all out, and, yes, was foreshadowed from the very beginning. Yet...

My problem with Brutal Legend is that it tries too hard to justify a romantic logic that needs no justification. I see now that I was mistaken, but my original impression of the gameworld was that it was basically Eddie's fantasy. Either his dying fantasy of a heavy metal paradise--the world as he wanted it to be--or some future version of Earth which had been destroyed and remade according to his musical tastes. At first I felt the legends you find all over the gameworld, which say things like "In the Beginning...there was Ormagoden...", were suggesting that Eddie's love of metal had been so powerful that his death created an actual god. I thought the legends were explaining what happened between the moment the opening cut-scene faded out (with hundreds of fans cheering the newly created Ormagoden as he screamed fire into the sky) and when Eddie woke up in the temple. I thought that 10,000 years had passed, and his love of metal--personified as a giant metal god--had shattered and rebuilt the world according to what Eddie thought was cool. This is why all the silliness of "And God created... Tailpipes! And Said they were... Awesome!" felt genuinely funny and clever to me. I thought Tim Schafer had come up with an ingenious way of explaining how a world that functioned on the logic of heavy metal album covers could exist: by suggesting that a roadie's true metal-ness had spontaneously granted him the power of creation. Because, I mean, come on... that's the only explanation that could possibly suffice, right? Heavy metal album covers are funny precisely because their logic is so nakedly inexplicable, that you simply have to surrender to the knowledge that there is no possible organizing force at work other than their makers' love of leather, cars, bikes, the occult, and musical equipment.

Near the beginning it felt to me like Brutal Legend understood this very well and had its tongue placed firmly in its cheek. The only organizing force for all its absurd imagery seemed to be Eddie's love of metal. Why do all these things exist and the world work this way? Because Eddie thinks they're awesome, obviously. This was explanation enough for me, and I felt the game gained a lot of charm from expressing the romantic logic of metal fandom with such uncompromising clarity. This was only enhanced by the implication of an either morbid subtext (Eddie's actually dead) or apocalyptic subtext (the world was actually destroyed) which kept the fantasy from seeming mindlessly fetishistic.

To find out I was totally wrong, that Schafer actually expects me to believe that this world--this world of tailpipes, leather, mudflap girls, choppers, giant stereo speakers, and 1980's hair-styles--actually existed thousands of years ago on our actual planet Earth? I find that explanation less believable than no explanation at all. But then I suppose if I start asking such questions and saying it doesn't make sense, I'd simply be told it was like questioning the logic of a metal album cover. You could easily make that argument, that if I'm okay with it begin Eddie's fantasy, I should be just as okay with it being Tim Schafer's fantasy. But somehow I'm not... maybe for the same reason I prefer the outright fantasy of Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 to the absurd pseudo-science of Metal Gear Solid 4. There's a quote I remember from a film critic criticizing the Midichlorians in Star Wars: Episode 1. He said "Adding physics to the metaphysics doesn't work." By trying to explain something magical too much you run the risk of making it seem both less magical and unsatisfactorily scientific.

Metal obviously needs no explanation. If Schafer had the conviction to really base the foundation of his entire story on this assumption it would have carried his vision all the way through to the end. Instead it only carries about half way, when explanations of the world's complex mythology begin to dilute a simple, compelling truth: that the best and only reason to do anything in Brutal Legend is because it fucking rocks.

Character 3D Model

2009-11-05T21:11:55Z

Here is a 3D Model of the main character from Abandon!

See you all tomorrow!

An Early Version of the GDD

2009-11-05T19:31:28Z

Here is an early version of the Abandon GDD.

Abandon_GDD.pdf

See you soon!

Early Gameplay Screen

2009-11-05T16:51:04Z

Here is an gameplay screen from one of the early builds of abandon. You can see some interesting things at play here, including emoticons (exclamation points) and a different score counter.

More coming up soon.

Protagonist Color Comparo

2009-11-05T14:39:21Z

Here is the main protagonist, in some different colored outfits!

More coming up soon!

An Interesting Sketch

2009-11-04T22:05:15Z

The title of this sketch is "Lonely."

Pretty interesting.

See you tomorrow.

Games at GAMBIT 11/6: Abstract Shooters

2009-11-04T21:46:59Z

This week's Games at GAMBIT will feature games where something flies around and possibly shoots things. At least, I think that's what is happening. Anyways, come play the games and debate the issue with us from 4:00 - 6:00!

Games include:

Tempest
Space Giraffe
Transcend
Everyday Shooter
Rez
Geometry Wars
Zoop

Meet the new bug, same as the old bug

2009-11-04T21:26:59Z

Sometimes programming feels a lot like playing Whack-A-Mole. You get one bug sorted out, then another one rears its head, and then another, and then somehow fixing that one brings the first one back again. And it brings a friend.

Now that we have Maya installed, I wanted to start incorporating the original Abandon models into the Unity version of the game. First I found out, much to my annoyance, that I couldn't just change the mesh on the model player I had been using, because the Maya models had multiple meshes. (Say that three times fast.) So I had to create a new object for the new Maya model... and suddenly all those problems I had with the physics functions, where I couldn't get the avatar to stop bouncing off of things, came back to haunt me, and the previous fixes (increasing the rigidbody's mass and drag) proved ineffective. Plus, despite gravity being turned on, under certain circumstances the avatar will end up hovering in midair:

On the plus side, now that I've got the hang of adding meshes, I can start to put in the shapes for the household objects, too. So currently the avatar is getting chased around the screen by a bathtub.

Objects

2009-11-04T20:19:35Z

With a primary emphasis on streamlining a 3D animation workflow, one task before the Abandon team was to create many 3D objects to automatically rig. Here are some of them.

See you in a little bit!

Early Logo Concept

2009-11-04T18:00:00Z

Here is an early team logo. In it you can see the development of the overall game asthetic with the black and white and red colors in stark contrast with each other:

See you soon!