Montreal Game Jam 2015: Pwrong

Some of you may have seen that I’ve been participating in a number of 1 hour game jams as of late (held at weekjam.com / #1hgj on AfterNET). They’re super short jams, so there’s not a lot to say about them – I might get around to doing a mass post mortem for them. Maybe. Until then, I am going to look back at a previous jam from earlier in the year and write a bit of a post mortem for it. This time I’m going to talk through my experiences at the 2015 Montreal Global Game Jam, where my team (known as “Not Enough Laptops”) entered for a third year running (this time with an additional programmer).

The Team

Anshul Goyal (Programming)
Sean Noonan (Art and additional design)
Pete Smith (Programming)
Aidan Green (Design and audio)

The Theme

What Do We Do Now?

Here was a theme that filled our minds with possibilities. It almost seemed “too easy”; it was hard not to come up with ideas. However it was not an easy task to decide which of these many ideas we should settle on. It was also when I noticed that we had matured as a group.

This was our third year jamming together and we weren’t as wide eyed, inexperienced or perhaps even as excited as we once were; we basically knew our limits, specialties, and we knew that we could succeed. We weren’t cynical by any means, but the ground felt familiar, and I feel our comforts resulted in an inability to decide on what to make.

Our first night had us pitching, scrawling, debating and scribbling out numerous game ideas; an adventure game of sorts where you wake up alongside a body with the police are banging on your door, a narrative heavy game where you play as a child dealing with the impending divorce of your parents, an isometric prisoner of war escape action game, and a bunch more… but nothing we could all fully agree on.

That is until midnight rolled around and we engaged full panic mode before thinking; what if we go with Pong, and the ball just vanishes? What could we do from there?

Pwrong.

The Jam

In essence, we planned our game as an homage to arcade games roughly spanning the generations; starting with Pong, moving through Pac-Man, switching to Akranoid, then R Type, in to Geometry Wars and finally teasing with a platformer.

Once we had finally decided on a rough concept we took our leave and slept on it some… as well as cramming in some last minute work - for example, I did a couple of colour scheme/interface mock ups, the first of which set the visual direction for the project.

The morning came and went – not that I saw it (I generally don’t rise during daylight on weekends). By the afternoon we realised that we were running behind our planned timeline. We should have had our first playable prototype, but were still not ready. It was around at this point I decided to cut myself off from the team and focus on the art.

I wasn’t used to working at such a high resolution, and the game type was something I’d never built art for. By the evening I’d managed to deliver the bulk of assets – I’d even over delivered by the scope of the game, as we had decided to cut the Geometry Wars game type and severely scale back the platforming section.

We pulled an all-nighter to just get it done. There was a bit of crankiness and we all felt awful, but as the sun rose and we tested the build, it felt worth it.

What went wrong

1. Brainstorm took far too long

As mentioned previously, this really took longer than it should have. I feel like I should shoulder the blame on this one. I personally had a hankering to create something pixel heavy; either something sickeningly cute or fast paced action with lots of explosions and screen shake. I was basically trying to steer all of the brainstorms towards one of these two forms. I simply wasn’t allowing for an organic process.

On top of this I also feel like I may have been on my own in that I was extremely resistant to anything narrative heavy. I wanted to create tight loops with high replayability; score attack, procedural generation, etc.

Basically, I feel my personal agenda got in the way on an early solution during brainstorming. I’ll try to be a little more aware of this in future jams.

2. The game was quite buggy

Though we fixed a bunch of issues post jam, we had a lot of bugs, most likely down to the scope of the game. I’m not sure what we could have done other than shrinking the scope, but with that being our unique feature, as it were, we were resistant to cut any more than we did.

3. Multiplayer only

Same story as with “No Evil”, multiplayer games, especially local, don’t always find an audience. They’re excellent games at the event locations, but once they’re released to the greater public, it’s easy for them to be ignored. Although we were low on time, it might have been preferable to drop the scope of the game a little in order to support solo play.

What went right

1. Two programmers helped with our scope

Our game was a collection of games – the increase in programmer count certainly was one of the driving factors in allowing us to achieve this feat. One of the programmers (Anshul) also wrote a post mortem where he discusses this in more depth – you can read that here.

2. We cut early

We cut the twin stick geometry wars clone early enough for us to continue to have a working flow, and for me to have not spent too much time creating new assets for it (though in the end, I had created most of them anyway).

Realistically it probably wouldn’t have been too difficult to implement the cut twin stick section post jam, but as is the case in most of these group game jams, the project is as it is on the final day, never to be returned to.

3. Tried a different visual style

A very personal positive from the jam – I tried a different style and scale and managed to pull it off. I never work at HD resolutions and always use pixel art as a crutch.

This really highlighted the need for me to start using Illustrator – using raster graphics to fake vectors is a huge time sink, especially when you consider that I have a program as powerful as Illustrator installed on my machine. I have already started learning Illustrator for future work.

The Game

Pwrong was well received, especially in it’s scope – we didn’t “win” anything as such but were name dropped amongst a list of honourable mentions. It was definitely one of the best jam games I’ve been a part of and it set me on a path of exploring vector art for future games.

Pwrong can be played over at GameJolt here: http://gamejolt.com/games/pwrong/45763

Final Words

Over the last couple of years “Not Enough Laptops” have followed up the Global Game Jam with the Ubisoft Game Jam under the name “Titanic Conspiracy”. However, with half of the members leaving Ubisoft and the other half wanting to participate in Ludum Dare instead, we decided to retire the name and sit out of the third Ubisoft jam.

Perhaps this was the final “Not Enough Laptops”/”Titanic Conspiracy” game, but I owe a lot to the various members for the opportunity to make games that I would never have on my own.

Here are the developers I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside in the jams over the last few years:

Aidan Green

I met Aidan at Ubisoft when working alongside him on Watch_Dogs; it was here where he introduced me to Construct 2, as well as the Montreal IGDA demo night. The demo night acted as an inspiring kick up the arse to participate in the global game jam. I strongly recommended anyone reading this to go to one of these IGDA nights in your area, or even travel  if needed. Very inspiring stuff.

In our game jams, Aidan was our primary designer and sometimes audio creator. Though we often had conflicting opinions on where to focus our time on design, I think resulted in richer experiences – with Aidan’s focus on mechanics and mine on details, we created games I don’t think that we’d have been able to create alone.

Aidan left Ubisoft Montreal after shipping Watch_Dogs and a stint on Far Cry 4. He’s now at Eidos Montreal working on Deus Ex - Mankind Divided.

Anshul Goyal

A coding machine, Anshul was another Ubisoft employee. I never had the pleasure to work professionally alongside him, but rather met him through Aidan. Anshul was responsible for the code side of all of our jams.

Seriously, a machine. We couldn’t have done any of our jams without him.

Anshul is still at Ubisoft Montreal.

Scott Morin

Scott and I started Ubisoft on the same day and quickly became design pals, despite his love for Blizzard and World of Warcraft (what a massive nerd).

Scott was present for our Ubisoft Montreal jams and responsible for design and art duties.

Scott left Ubisoft Montreal after shipping Watch_Dogs and now teaches level design at Vancouver Film School. Scott and I are also working on this…

Pete Smith

I met Pete through Aidan just before the 2015 global game jam. I don’t think we’d have been able to finish Pwrong without him. Not only did he bring code, but really solid design feedback.

Pete left Ubisoft Montreal a couple months ago and is now going it alone.

Jean-Sébastien Caron

JS joined us for the 2013 Global Game Jam providing art. There was a wee language barrier at times, but that’s not unusual for game development in Montreal.

I’ve not heard from JS in a while, but a quick Google shows that he’s currently an animator at FAKE Digitial Entertainment. Nice.

David Baron

Indie warrior and fellow level designer on Watch_Dogs, David was present during our first couple of jams, providing design input and feedback.

David left Ubisoft in the later days of Watch_Dogs and is now at Eidos Montreal working on Deus Ex - Mankind Divided.

 

 

Many thanks to you all.

Games I played in 2014

So as stated in a previous post, I’ve achieved a hell of a lot this year – shipped two top 10 AAA games with Ubisoft (Watch_Dogs and Far Cry 4) as well my own first indie game, Jack B. Nimble (yes, this is me giving myself a pat on the back).

Somehow I even managed to play through and finish a bunch of games too – less than I was planning from last year (and mostly different), but still a healthy chunk of gaming. One observation is the large increase in indie titles that I’ve gobbled up over the year – significantly more than last year anyway. Another thing that is clear is how I’ve shifted my focus from almost exclusively Xbox 360 to PC and PS4. I’ve barely touched the Xbox One this year, something I think is down to Killzone: Shadowfall being my multiplayer game of choice rather than Titanfall – it just meant my PS4 was switched ‘on’ more often.

Xbox One

• Super Time Force

Xbox 360

• Gears of War 3
• The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct
• Metal Gear Solid 2
• The Walking Dead: Season 2
• The Wolf Among Us (Episode 1)

Playstation 4

• Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
• Call of Duty: Ghosts
• Wolfenstein: The New Order
• Watch_Dogs
• Watch_Dogs: Bad Blood
• P.T.
• Flower
• Games of Thrones (Episode 1)

Playstation 3

• Uncharted 3
• Journey

Playstation Vita

• Thomas Was Alone

PC

• Quake
• Quake Mission Pack 1: Scourge of Armagon
• Half-Life 2
• Half-Life 2: Episode One
• Half-Life 2: Episode Two
• Home
• Gunpoint
• Gone Home
• Savant – Ascent
• Jazzpunk
• Dear Esther
• Organ Trail

While I didn’t finish FTL, Don’t Starve or Heavy Bullets, their rogue-like nature had me pouring hundreds of hours into them between them (especially FTL).

So yeah, I basically didn’t even touch my pile of shame or do even a tenth as many game jams as I wanted – as a result my plans for 2015 are a little more restrained than last year (but still probably too much).

• Start working on a new indie game (!!!)
• Finish the final content updates for Jack B. Nimble
• Port Jack B. Nimble to other platforms
  • Android
  • Windows 8 and Mobile
  • PC, Mac and Linux
• Submit something to Pixel Dailies at least once a week
• Participate in the following game jams
  • EVERY One Game A Month jam
  • Global Game Jam 2015
  • Ubisoft Game Jam (if there is another)
• Play through the following games
  • Quake Mission Pack 2
  • Portal 2
  • STALKER
  • FEAR
  • Battlefield 4
  • Far Cry 4
  • Metal Gear Solid 3
  • Assassin’s Creed Revelations

There are a few things that I totally dropped from last year; I decided to stop taking part in Ludum Dare/One Game A Month in favour of shifting my focus to Jack B. Nimble. Even taking part in a weekend jam had consequences on development, so around April I just stopped jamming. I also put One Day From Retirement on ice; I wasn’t very happy with the progress I was making and again, couldn’t give up time that I needed for other projects. It may come back in some form…

It’s rather unlikely that I will experience the same level as achievement in 2015 as I did in 2014, but I will be hitting the age of 30 – which is pretty good going, aye?

Montreal Game Jam 2014: Bad Mood Rising

I didn’t blog about this at the time, but felt like I should go back and document my 2014 global game jam experience, having participated two years in a row (and get it out of the way before the second Ubisoft Montreal Game Jam begins tomorrow).

The Team

Aidan Green (Design and audio)
Anshul Goyal (Programming)
Sean Noonan (Art and additional design)

The Theme

We don't see things as they are,
we see them as we are.

The Jam

The theme really threw us at first, and we struggled with a couple of weak ideas in our initial brainstorm session. However, it wasn’t long before Aidan piped up with a more personal take on the theme, the gist being…

When someone becomes angry things that would otherwise seem perfectly harmless can be perceived as hostile, and they can lash out at things and people around them.

Once we decided this was to be our take on the theme, we quickly hit the ground running – this would be our third organised game jam together, so we had a good idea where our strengths were; Anshul got his head stuck into the code, Aiden wrote up the design and I worked on a visual style/form proposal.
With our team smaller than last year, we attempted to keep the scope super tight by limiting the number of player actions and the amount of planned content. In retrospect I was probably a little too confident in my ability to nail the style early and use all the time remaining just churning out content – this didn’t exactly go to plan…

The Postmortem

What went wrong

1. Art was a bottleneck

At last year’s game jam we went too far pushing “form follows function”. We did this to the point that we lacked the visual charm that was needed to attract people to play the game/keep playing. I really, really wanted to redeem that this time around, but we didn’t anticipate how much of a bottleneck I would become when it came to asset creation. I took a long time up front planning how the game would look as well as choosing a colour palette, spending my time getting inspirations from some of Dali’s abstract works, but in the end I didn’t have the confidence to deliver anything with that level of creativity in the time we had.
I ended up settling on a muted crate paper look/feel that drew a small amount of inspiration from that initial research.
While I was quick to provide placeholders for environment assets, I was slow on the character and animation front, and I feel this held the game back from my next point…

2. The game was playable late

Just like last year, the game wasn’t playable until the final hours, so we had very little time to playtest. I feel we just lucked out that we had something playable and reasonably fun at all. That said, had we playtested I feel we would have just reduced the amount of time the player was “aggro’d” for and probably reworked some of the enemy paths… basically that would have just been tuning, which to be fair, is a nice situation to be in.
With this being the second year in a row that this point was an issue though, I am going to do everything in my power to get future games playable earlier.

3. My hardware wasn’t suitable

This was a personal issue for me, but developing art on a Microsoft Surface Pro for extended periods is extremely uncomfortable. There’s the small (and low down) screen, reduced keyboard and a not so optimal mouse. This really slowed my progress down and didn’t help with my temperament when dealing with sleep deprivation and general development frustrations. This meant that the majority of my best work was done at home before bed and in the morning before I left to return to the jam location – not an ideal situation.
Next time I will be sure to either use my MacBook or perhaps use the Surface again, but with a USB keyboard and mouse as well as HDMI out to a monitor.

What went right

1. We achieved a (relatively) polished game

Early on we decided to focus on quality over quantity, but kept our plans relatively generous with a lot of “nice to have’s”. When we discovered that art was becoming a slight bottleneck and the game still wasn’t playable, we cut our level content to a quarter of our original plan – something short and sweet was preferable to something long and broken.

It paid off, we had nothing but positive feedback from people at the jam and online as well as the game’s GameJolt page. We even won a judge’s choice award at the end of the jam!

2. We had a full team contribution

It felt like everyone made a really solid contribution to the project, and there was a really good feeling that we’d achieved something by the end. Aidan even put together a bunch of music – something which wasn’t initially planned.
I have referenced the project several times since and it will likely influence how things go ahead at the Ubisoft Game Jam tomorrow.

3. We used social media

Whenever there was a moment of down time I took to Twitter, Facebook and GameJolt (my indie game portal of choice) to talk through development and show work in progress shots. Said media was getting hundreds of views within minutes of being uploaded - it was a real confidence boost and gave us a much needed second wind before the end. Upon release, the game quickly amassed 500 unique plays on GameJolt, which was nice to see.

Never neglect social media…

The Game

"Bad Mood Rising"

Play it here!

Bad Mood Rising was an experimental game for us. It’s a game about how different the world feels when you are angry. We represented this by having the player attempt to make their way through a dangerous environment whilst avoiding obstacles. Said obstacles would take the form of enemies or hazards and would act as the instigators of the player’s anger. If the player collides with an obstacle their rage becomes unbearable and the creatures in the environment would turn hostile. The player would have the chance to defend themselves against the onslaught of incoming hostiles for the duration of their anger, which depleted over time as they calmed down. Only while calm can the player progress through the game.

You can play it in your browser or grab a download over at the link below…

http://gamejolt.com/games/adventure/bad-mood-rising/21627/

Here are a couple of screenshots of the game too…

Wish us luck for the Ubisoft Game Jam tomorrow!

Ubisoft Montreal Game Jam 2013: Spring Break

2 weeks ago I took part in Ubisoft Montreal's first game jam. The game jam was 48 hours and held at the Ubisoft Montreal studio. The rules of the game jam were simple, participants had 48 hours to make a game with a maximum team size of 5 and following the theme of “Spring”. Games were also intended to touch on “high emotional impact” (whatever that means). There was the added bonus over other game jams whereby workstations and software were provided – this would have been extremely useful at the Global Game Jam.

The group we usually refer to as “Not Enough Laptops” (Anshul Goyal, Aidan Green, Scott Morin and myself) got together again to form “Titanic Conspiracy”. We decided to take the theme of “Spring” by creating a game parodying the American tradition of getting wasted and being a general douche over the Easter period. Thus "Spring Break” was born.

With our team small, we decided each of us was to craft a mini game based on a different spring break activity. This split didn’t go much further than brainstorming as Anshul had to focus on code and I had to focus on visuals, leaving Aiden and Scott to work on base mechanics and each double up on activities.

We had a white board’s worth of planned activities ranging from driving to fighting (there was even an homage to hot coffee at one point). We settled on getting ready, surfing, dancing and fighting. We managed to finish the project with all activities in place each with their own unique assets, however a last minute bug prevented us from including the fighting mini game – arguably the activity that took the most time to create. We rolled with the punches though and presented the game without the activity. To be honest, it wasn’t really missed.

We had an awesome time coming up with the design and quotes of the idiotic and debaucherous protagonist, “Chet Speedrider”. Characterised by his bouncing quiff and oversized head, he was one of our first attempts at eliciting humour – our own attempt at “high emotional impact”. I actually sketched the character on paper during the initial game jam meeting, and that was the character we “shipped” with. Scott and Aiden came up with the quotes that Chet would spout as he was rated within the various mini games (“YOLO” seems to be a popular one).
We stuck to a relatively consistent style that I feel gave us the tightest “look” that we’ve managed to achieve in the game jams that at least I’ve participated in so far. The idea was to keep the character sprites simple and colourful as well as maintaining a low frame count in the animations to ensure the project was achievable whilst providing a retro aesthetic. We juxtaposed the characters with photo realistic backgrounds treated with a simple “cut out” filter to minimise the workload and give the characters a “pop” on screen.

Getting validation from our peers was extremely satisfying on this project, because making something funny is actually rather difficult. It’s hard to know whether or not one’s sense of humour will resonate with other people. I was so relieved when others laughed and enjoyed what we had created - it meant we were successful in what we had set out to achieve.

Although Ubisoft now owns the game and as such remains unplayable to the public, it has been immortalised on the Internet in the form of a trailer that I created one night before we released our game to the company.

There were a lot of awesome games created over the game jam; some single player, some multiplayer, some 2D, some 3D, some serious, some humorous… quite a range. We didn’t “win” but we were one of the judges’ honourable mentions, and as stated previously, we made people laugh – that was our goal, and we achieved it.

We were asked a couple of questions about what advice we might give to future game jam participants. This is what I said…

DO

• Ask for help if you're stuck on something. Your time is limited, d3on't let pride slow you down.
• Have a contingency plan. Things often go wrong last minute. Having a group agreed, planned list of potential cuts will help if something unplanned occurs.
• Have fun! Don’t take it too seriously.

DONT

• Don't be too precious of your own ideas, enjoy and embrace the collaborative process!
• Don't be afraid to use placeholders. Always make sure your game will be functional. Asset creation is a huge time sink.
• Don't forget about areas of development that maybe outside of your team's experience.

Until next time, and look out for more Ubisoft news soon!

One Game A Month: A Shadow From Beyond

So last month our little group that we refer to as “Not Enough Laptops” finished our second group game, “A Shadow From Beyond”. Like our first game, “Hjarta”, we created it in Unity, though this time it took over a month rather than a weekend. It started out as an attempt at the 7 Day Rogue Like challenge but the scope was too wide for that time frame, so we turned the focus more towards One Game A Month.

A Shadow From Beyond is a rogue like. The player takes control of an old man and must wander through randomly generated streets, filled with enemy cultists and monsters. The player’s goal is to dispatch cultists and unsummon as many monsters as possible. Simple, except for the fact that monsters are invulnerable to attack – the player must therefore piece together how the monster was summoned in the first place and oppose it’s elemental properties…

You can get a little more information about the game and give it a download, over at it’s indiedb page, here.

Screenshots

Personal Postmortem

I took a more “additional design” approach on this project and opted to work more on the art front - something I have a few regrets about. By taking a back seat on the design side I felt that I lost interest and focus on the project rather rapidly. At times it almost felt like I wasn’t working on the project at all, just polishing art that may or may not matter because the context of the assets that I was creating had become unclear to me. I’m not entirely sure if it was a product of working remotely or not, but I know the lack of face time definitely would have played a factor.

I feel that my motivation was nixed as I wasn’t able to keep up a consistent visual style across the project, simply because I couldn’t create assets fast enough. My selfish focus was more towards improving my skills rather than completing the project. I spent far too long trying to perfect the monster sprites and their associated animations – something that in the grand scheme of things wasn’t actually that important, though it was an excellent learning experience. I found that working with sprites that large and that complicated was easier said than done. If I was to go back I would have suggested working half the resolution and upscaling by double (or quadruple) – we could have achieved much more detailed visuals in a much shorter time frame (see the example below).

I also feel that even the slightest bit of my input on design may have helped the game be a little clearer for new players, simply because more eyes on a project is almost always a good thing - especially where tutorials or signs and feedback are concerned. I was just too distant from the design when it really mattered. That being said, the resulting game is pretty cool and although I wasn’t happy with the quantity of my contributions, I’m glad to have worked on it and hope to pull off something of this quality in the future.

Here’s a bunch of assets I created for the project – I’m rather happy with some, but embarrassed about others. Either way, it was a hell of a learning experience.

The attack animation didn’t make it into the final game on account that it was a little slow and we ran out of time to alter it. We had planned to have multiple colours of cultist, but again ran out of time to create and implement them.

There were 12 monsters in all, but you’ll have to play the game to see them!

Games I played in 2012

I’m not one for end of year posts, but it's been a pretty eventful year for me. I moved to Canada, started a new job at Ubisoft Montreal, began work on Watch Dogs (and had a secret previous project leaked/revealed in the form of Streets of Rage…), but that's all relatively obvious at this stage and I've already talked about it before.

So what did I actually do this year? Well, I played a pretty large amount of games, especially for someone engaged deep in development - quite a feat I assure you. I’ll list off what I managed to finish this year separated by system, a game of the year list, this is not.

Xbox 360

• Goldeneye 007 Reloaded
• Battlefield 3
• Modern Warfare 3
• Deus Ex Human Revolution
• Far Cry 2
• Rayman Origins
• LA Noire
• GTA IV: The Lost and Damned
• Wet
• Prince of Persia (2008)
• Dante's Inferno
• Assassin's Creed
• GRAW 2
• Batman Arkham City
• Saw
• TMNT

Xbox Live Arcade

• The Walking Dead
• Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light
• Sonic The Hedgehog
• Raskulls

Playstation 3

• Resistance 3
• Killzone 3
• Uncharted
• Uncharted 2
• Starhawk
• inFAMOUS

Playstation Vita

• Uncharted Vita
• Lumines: Electronic Symphony

Nintendo 3DS

• Zelda: Ocarine of Time 3D
• Resident Evil: Revelations

Nintendo GBA

• Zelda: The Minish Cap

PC

• Half-Life
• Half-Life: Opposing Force
• Half-Life: Decay
• Half-Life: Blue Shift

iOS

• 10000000
• Plants vs Zombies
• Batman Arkham City Lockdown
• Rebuild

Not a bad stab at my pile of shame, huh? To summarise, it seems that my platform of choice is most definitely the Xbox 360, the Playstation 3 is reserved purely for platform and exclusives, and I didn’t play a whole lot of iOS or downloadable titles this year.

I hope next year I play a couple more up to date titles…

2011 – Thanks for playing!

I’ve yet to comment on 2011 coming to a close, so I’ll do it now.

2011 was an interesting year - I learnt skills in areas I didn't even know were available to me, gained a lot of experience using multiple game engines/technology, and on top of that played a metric fuck tonne of games.

Unfortunately there were no releases from me/Ruffian in 2011 and there’s nothing I can talk about regarding future projects. That being said, Kinect Star Wars just saw its release, and I did a little bit of level design work on that. It seems to be getting average reviews from games press with some more favourable reviews from generalist media. The Internet is ablaze with talk of the dance mode – I think it’s rather amusing.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes...

Last year my plan was to finish a horror game each month - I failed miserably, but did manage to complete my other task, which was to finish the half-life anthology for the first time (wee write ups of these are linked below).

• Half-Life
• Half-Life: Decay
• Half-Life: Opposing Force
• Half-Life: Blue Shift

On top of that, I managed to play some other Half-Life mods such as the rather special, “Someplace Else” – a mod that manages to make Xen fun (yes, it’s possible), and I finally got around to playing Portal, and bloody good it was too!

…which brings me to this year’s challenge; I’m going to play through Half-Life 2, both it’s episodes, and Portal 2. I plan to start some time next month.

A couple of quick thoughts…

• Loving online games (Gotham City Impostors, Killzone 3)
• Loving my iPad (the GTA III port is great)
• Loving cheap games on Steam (especially the Christmas offers)
• Loving my Playstation Vita (Lumines is akin to crack)
• Not loving my Nintendo 3DS (but Resident Evil: Revelations is great)
• Loving LoveFilm (catching up on old classics)
• Not loving Netflix (but the anime selection is worth the subscription)

I’m currently developing a UDK game under the amusing working title of “Shootan”, updates can be found via the label here.

Stories from Black Mesa: Opposing Force & Blue Shift

If you'd asked me several years ago what my favourite shooter was I’d have probably answered, “Half-Life… well, actually the first add on pack, Opposing Force”, and sometimes I’d blaspheme further by suggesting that “Gearbox understand fun and pacing better than Valve”.

…but obviously those are rather unfair and perhaps uniformed statements. Valve created Half-Life, which bore the core mechanics, technology, characters, story and world which Gearbox then added to and expanded upon.

Opposing Force

I was always a fan of Opposing Force - I enjoyed the different point of view of the scenario that Half-Life offered and preferred its campaign length and pacing. It enriched the universe and helped the connect the player to Black Mesa and it’s characters in the same way a TV series’ can grab people based upon it’s location or character offerings.

 

Maybe this is why Valve tried to take Half-Life 2 episodic?

It could have worked….

You played as Adrian Sheppard, a soldier and survivor of the Black Mesa accident, exploring the research facility after the fact. The cross over points are handled well, you'll see Gordon jumping into the Xen portal as Sheppard, and witness the aftermath of Gordon’s handiwork throughout the campaign. All the nods and winks tie together nicely.

Going back, it's held up pretty well; some excellent combat set pieces, particularly when first facing the black ops soldiers - good enemy positioning and an old school large enemy count far exceeding the numbers found in half-life.

There were some old school issues, such as the frankly unforgiveable sections where health must be lost to continue past a point - possibly ending the game for poorer players who play with only one save.
I got stuck in a few places due to some poor brush work in some of the rougher jumping puzzles/secrets causing me to have to reload my game in one instance.
The squad scripted sequences were a little bit pointless, but back in 1999 this was probably pretty innovative, and it does further the simple Scientist and Barney interaction of Half-Life.
Also, what’s with holding down the crowbar button immediately firing when the weapon changes? Button debouncing clearly wasn’t thought about back then - it’s pretty annoying when you’re crunching your wrench through a bunch of crates, picking up a Laser Tripmine then immediately placing it, obviously causing player death shortly after. Grrr.
Almost as annoying as the Head Crabs in dark vent sections… something which never gets old. /sarcasm

All of these issues are made up by the fact that Opposing Force is free of Xen levels and the latter half of the game puts the player up against new enemies, the inhabitants of “DIMENSION X”! They’re a fun bunch to fight against, even if their visual aesthetic looks a bit dated. On top of that, the new weapons were pretty good; a Sniper Rifle and Heavy Machine Gun (a weapon I used for almost exclusively for the latter portion of the game). I wasn't the huge fan of the game’s take on the BFG9000, but then uber weapons have always been a hard thing to get right – Gearbox aren’t the first to fall at this hurdle. The portable Barnacle was quite cool if a little underused. The two Dimension X weapons were forgettable, one the equivalent of the Hornet Gun was average at best (along with being annoying as a sentient creature in the world) and the other being a take on an alien rocket launcher. 

Opposing Force closes with the possibility of a sequel, and the way the G Man frames it, Sheppard could end up anywhere - it's unlikely that gearbox will visit this franchise again, so I'll pretend that I'm playing as Sheppard in Prey 2 (a route I could picture an Opposing Force sequel taking).

If Gearbox made an actual sequel I would buy it. Twice.

Blue Shift

As I understand it, Blue Shift started out as a campaign to accompany the Dreamcast version of Half-Life – this was later canned and released as a PC expansion (that happened to not require the original Half-Life to play). The canned Dreamcast title featured high definition models which were available as replacement pack which updated Half-Life’s ageing character and weapon models (which is something I had enabled whilst playing Opposing Force). I didn’t play Blue Shift back when it was released – I had moved onto Halo and left the PC behind, so I didn’t have the familiarity or nostalgia I had when going back to play Half-Life, Decay or Opposing Force.

In Blue Shift you take up the role as Barney – who is now a named character rather than a generic copy paste character. The story is weaker than the other expansions and puts you in the shoes of the security worker who is late and locked out of a security door, who just happens to be seen by an on looking Gordon Freeman on the start of his adventure in the original Half-Life (you also get to see one of the Half-Life: Decay player characters on CCTV). It’s a bit of a push and not handled as subtly as Opposing Force – and that sums up the overall experience. It’s not as tightly put together or polished as Opposing Force. It feels slightly rushed and that Gearbox were maybe trying to do more than the engine would realistically (read: reliably) allow.

Sure - it was refreshing to be taking on the soldiers once again, the Dimension X and Black Ops enemies started to bore me by the end of Opposing Force, but Blue Shift is also a lot shorter, and not in a good way. The brief length just highlights the annoyances.

Dodgy scripting being the prime concern. It wasn’t unusual to get stuck in an elevator and have to rely on a previous save to continue progress, or having to push AI characters (usually Dr Rosenberg) into correct spots to trigger events - it's rough.

On top of that there are annoying gameplay issues - enemies in loading corridors, really? Turrets around blind corners, are you serious? And they have the silent protagonist talking, by that I mean people responding to an imaginary voice you only have to assume is coming from the player – not that you actually hear anything… oh, and you go to Xen.

However it was nice to see some pre Half-Life 2 physics puzzles even if there was a lack of any other scripted sequences or interaction.

I’d find it hard to recommend going back to play Blue Shift for anything other than completion sake.

Beyond…

Pointless bloggery, won’t be doing that again in a hurry – will probably post a response to the new year at some point.

I’m currently playing Half-Life 2, Bully and Final Fantasy XIII.