machai-umno

John over at Moddler came back with a great price. I still needed to adjust the scale slightly to get it within my budget. The completed models will stand roughly 9-9.5" tall. John will print it when he gets back from a much needed vacation.

The answer to this blog is probably going to be that the game industry dug this hole all by themselves and that we now have to live with it. Since we released the first teaser of Penumbra: Overture in 2006 we have always received the expected comments "the graphics suck", "looks dated", "hmm, is this running on the Wii?" and so on and on. This has also echoed back in reviews, only with a bit more elegant phrasing. Now four years later, the same pattern (slightly less to be fair) repeats for the teasers that we have released of our upcoming game, Amnesia: The Dark Descent . We have upped our graphics game, not only in technical fidelity, but also tremendous efforts has been made with the design and creation of the graphics, far above any of the Penumbra games. Sure, the game industry has taken the graphical technology and fidelity even further during this period, so our efforts are minimized by this. But even so, we have at least tried. During the same pe...

Jon asked if I could make a large bug. This strays a bit from the tanks and hard surface models, so I wanted to stretch my Zbrush wings and give it a shot. I'm still not sure how to deal with components and fit but I'm sure I'll find out :)

We hit a milestone today. I just sent the Leviathan out for quote. If everything works out $$ wise it will be printed in the next few weeks and then its on to clean up and molds. I'm sure it wont be cheap; I have the paramedics on speed dial in case I need them :) You can see the number of components, I will sprue many of these together for the production kit. I wanted to give this model the ability to be customized and posed, hence the great many parts. The first release will be the Mortis and the Crusader, others to follow.

Introduction Stories are something that is very important to us humans and also a crucial part of many video games. In some games the player is the author of the story, for example in Civilization where you are given some basic start resources and are then free to decide how your story will play out. In other games the designer has the most control of the story and the game mechanics do their best to guide the payer through the narrative (which may dynamic or linear). While the player-as-author stories are interesting, what I will discuss here is the type of stories that have been designed. Some people have argued that games are inferior at telling these kind of stories, something I do not agree with. While the games out today certainly do not compete with stories found in books and movies, I believe that the problem is that the medium is simply not been used correctly. Plot-based Stories Most games that are story heavy tells a narrative using a linear plot; in other words a string o...

MERCS has a new release coming. I worked on the Kem Var weapons for them last time and was fortunate enough to work on this release of the FCC weapons as well. These have been sent in for final approval. You can see the art Keith provided and my 3d models based on his designs. You may note the barrels look a bit large; keep in mind they are just under 1mm thick and any thinner they would be likely to snap. Great and very talented guys with wonderful minis.   http://www.mercsminis.com/

Suh-weet  ;)

Name: The Statement of Randolph Carter Type: Short Story Link: Complete Text This is one of my favorite stories from HP Lovecraft and it should also serve as an excellent introduction. It is very short and a perfect example of fear of the unknown. This story really got to under my skin and has served as an important influence when coming up with good scares for our horror games. It is also interesting to note that the story started out as dream that Lovecraft had and the story is extremely close to actual dream*. This makes the story a sort insight into the disturbing mind of the master himself! Hope you enjoy it and for those of you that have not read anything by Lovecraft, I hope this makes you eager to read more! *Read it here . Thanks to Sebastian for the tip!