Ars has a great review of a great game.. I feel that it may be slightly skewed due to it being played on the console(meh) and therefor the gameplay of course suffers horrible as the FPS was never meant to be played with those god awful analogue sticks, but with a mouse that becomes and extension of your arm and your mind!
Recording a great articles by Bruno-Urbain on playtesting over at www.industrybroadcast.com and the day is looking better.. Sometimes it just takes hours to get the productivity ball rolling but a little meditation sesh and a podcast and I am off to the races.
Gratitude is one thing I cannot overlook either.. I am grateful for this cup of coffee and the energy it gives me, I am grateful for Erik and Brad coming together on this deal, I am grateful for my motivation and inspiration, I am grateful for our new web designer, I am grateful for his awesome designs, I am grateful for Mikes Patience, I am grateful for my new CPU, I am grateful for Aaron, I am grateful for Kirk, I am grateful for Badu and I grateful for Rael
Oct 29
Thank god I finally uninstalled that piece of garbage game today.. Chromium is a game that came closest I feel to being something great but because of a designer who obviously(I am pretty sure he works for NASA) is a genius yet lacks any sort of common practical intelligence whatsoever. The only reason I say this is because I am absolutely certain that specific game mechanics were implemented just to appease his ego and to piss the player off.
Examples are that every time you start a new game in the same session it ramps up the frame rate of the game making everything come at you faster and faster.. To give you reference the game normally plays at 50-60fps, after starting 10 new games you are at 120fps making the game insanely difficult and frustrating for someone that doesn’t know what is going on as youjust feel like you are getting worse and worse
Secondly the collission detection is made by a 6 year old. You have a shield around your ship that makes other enemy ships bounce off, yet to pick up a powerup you literally must get it overtop of the center pixel of your ship.. You can’t touch it with a wing or the nose, so you end up missing all of the powerups while the enemies sneak by
Third and most obvious being that when you die the game just ends and prints ‘looser’ on the screen a clear indication that the designer is mainly there to make the player feel like garbage
The problem with Chromium however is that the actual game idea and elements are great! The concept, the power ups, the strategy that you develop when playing is fantastic and hte game itself could have been a massive hit in the casual gaming world I feel had the designer actually made this game with the thought that it coudl be something great. Instead It is apparent he went into it thinking that it would never amount to anything publically so why not put in features that piss off his friends and random players so that he could sit back and be smug in his geekdom that he just called 500 people a looser today. If he didn’t work at NASA I would be sitting smug knowing that his ego probably blew a chance at a dream job designing games for a living, but working at NASA I can imagine he already has his dream job. Pity, as I would have liked to at least have a bit of smugness in me today. Instead I just get to uninstall the source of my morning frustrations and never have to look at it again
You can grab the game here: http://www.reptilelabour.com/software/chromium/
Review here: http://tuxtoday.wordpress.com/2007/08/12/chromium-an-addictive-vertical-scrolling-shooting-game/
One of the key challenges with managing such a diverse and geographically spread out team is communications.. We have 46 members now from Pakistan to LA and getting them all included in talks and discussions is critical. The problem is that no one seems to have a standards IM they use.. So you need the ability to not only be able to speak with them on their terms in a way that is convenient for you but also offer them additional and easy to use methods to participate in group discussions. This is what I do:
For myself my Linux IM clients of choice are:
Gaim Allows me to connect to multiple clients(AIM, ICQ, Gtalk, etc etc)and have everything in one easy to use program. The big downside for me on this is that it doesn’t support offline MSN messages, which can be important at times
Because of my need for offline messaging I use this.. It is nice and simple and offers a lot of options that make my life easier. For some reason though my webcam only broadcasts in Dark Purple 
IRC is a bit trickier.. I don’t have enough registered Undernet users to register a channel but what I do have is an Eggdrop Bot that connects from my webserver and holds the channel for me, and gives me op status when I log in. Although not as used as IM’s IRC does get a lot of use during our weekly meetings as it allows everyone, no matter what, get together for a real time txt chat while we are carrying on in Teamspeak
I’ve been using YaBB for years now and am happy with it.. Unfortunately the community isn’t as active as it once was so the amount of plugins working with the latest versions have been dropping off severly but it still does what I need it to do and changing over the 7000 posts to another BB system would be hell. We have all WIP concepts and models posted up here for group discussions and really hammer home the importance of everyone getting together for discussions.. Recently this has really taken off with speedpainting threads being very active and more importantly theories behind game story and mechanics(fashion for example).
The ONLY way this team runs at all is because of Dot.Project. All tasks and jobs go through this site and it allows me to quickly check on peoples progress(as long as they are updating it) and carry on more 1on1 communications with people regarding their individual tasks. All final models, textures and whatnot are uploaded here and kept in a nice centralized location for easy access and reference later on.. Dot project has something changed the way we run the team and it is the primary reason for our success. It should be noted that some PHP hacking was needed to make it do what we needed and it does take a lot of diligence setting all of your tasks up and staying on top of having jobs lined up for months ahead of time.
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