machai-umno

Sometimes models seem to make themselves, other times it’s like beating a steel plate with a foam rubber mallet. This project was the latter. Jon at Khurasan has been keeping me busy; he gave me a good description and a few concept images to work with. The concepts had differing styles, Crab, Turtle and Arachnid. Jon also wanted a smooth surface free of clutter and minor details, bolts and such. Normally I can just make a concept sketch and get to work but this one was difficult for some reason. Even after the concept sketch that Jon signed off on, I still found myself unable to jell the idea in my head. Perhaps it was my sweet dog Maggie passing. Perhaps such a large model without surface detail intimidated me. Whatever the cause it took a while to find my Design-Fu. In the end, the “Fu” flowed and I was able to give Jon something we were both happy with. You can see from the component view that its a dual layer turret, each can fire at different targets. The head and all six legs can...

Maggie was about the best four legged companion one could ask for; she passed peacefully at home on the 22nd after 13 years of love and joy. We will miss her deeply.

                        Dropship Horizon Link

After a lot of work we are finally done with the teaser ! Hope you all enjoy it! In case you have not seen the teaser yet then do so before continuing with this post: The map played in this teaser is based upon two other maps from the game and have been especially built to show of the mood and gameplay of Amnesia . If you are worried that the teaser will spoil parts of the game for you, have no fear, the exact events of the trailer are not in the game, but there will be some that are quite similar. The map took about two days to build and script and then it took around 100 playthroughs before we got it as we wanted. Whenever I felt satisfied, I showed Jens a clip and he immediately gave me a list of uncountable other things that I could do better. As if Jens obsession for details was not enough, I also had to record the teaser while having an extremely smoothed camera. This meant that I had to pre-plan all camera movements because when ever I moved the mouse, the camera just gently flo...

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Introduction This post aims to be a deeper look at my earlier rant about meaning, narrative (plot) and gameplay. After considering feedback and thinking about it some more I would now like to write a more constructive text. In this post I will outline some steps and ways of thinking that I think are needed in order to achieve deeper and more varied meaning in games. "Deeper meaning" is of course a highly subjective thing, but what I mean is simply games where the core is not just about a gameplay mechanic, showing entertaining gore or similar. Instead, the focus should be on exploring something other than pure "fun". Meaning should come first Instead of starting out with a gameplay mechanic, one should find some other kind of meaning to have at the core. Note, that "meaning" does not have to be something hard to understand or extremely profound. "The joys of snowboarding" is one kind of meaning and "What is it like to be homeless?" is...

               L-HAC 19 min 27 seconds in....

Gawd I been buisy... Here is something I finally got around to throwing up on the web server.                       Click here to download -Leviathan 101-

Yesterday, after several weeks of grueling 15 hour (kid you not) days, we finally reached a really important milestone here at Frictional Games. It's by far the most important milestone we have reached so far and might be the most important milestone of the entire project! We have completed making the Alpha version! For ALL Platforms! (Windows, Mac and Linux that is) So what does this mean? In general terms it means that we now have a large chunk of the game done which we can evaluate and draw conclusions from. More specifically it means: All code for tech, tools and game are done and what is left is basically polish. Note again that this is for all platforms! Sure, the polish is not an easy thing and can include plenty of smaller feature additions, but it is a road map that we can control and plan for. We can now, for the first time in almost three years, test the game and see how it really plays like! We now have all of the design for the game done and know with strong certai...