The diary of a game designer

Day 162 - I actually drew a girl

2006-11-23T22:30:00.000Z

Maybe it's just personal preference, but I don't really like drawing girls. But here's one, for our game.

Bewbies

Day 157 - Sammy

2006-11-19T22:37:00.000Z

So I decided to get myself a Nintendo DS a few days before the Wii releases.

His name is Sammy

I've heard a lot of good things about the handheld, but I'm still utterly amazed at the games they have on it. Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! is one of the gems where you can appreciate its addictiveness and humor just by looking at it.

With the deadline of the MSC Game Pitch competition just around the corner, there's quite a lot of work to do between Slade and me. The style guide is being re-written for the second time since we starter development, due to major changes in setting and storyline. Let's see... the story is moved another two hundred years into the future; we scrapped that whole 'replicating creatures from other dimensions' thing; we did lots of naming; and so on.

The emblems of the three cities in the first edition of the game

Day 143 - rI csn't feel myllipsd

2006-11-06T16:31:00.000Z

Oh snap.

Well, we gt a guy over."e s having the sme birthday as wme, but he hasn't drank efore in his olife. hristian or now, he's gona fish his first an.
'
/Slade, jEY and Mayr (slade's suter) RANKA S WWELL dunrng our birthdays, but the most I've drank wa dstree cans,. Thistime I drank sevem.

THere's 113.75ml millileters of alcohol coursiing theough my veins now.

A third of aa Coco=cola cale;.nes.

I'm feleing numf all over now. Is iy alcohol poionoing.?

THer's some rock playingin the dcbackrgron now.

WHedeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Day 143 - Happy Birthday to me

2006-11-06T15:55:00.001Z

And I'm onto my seventh can of Carlsberg now.

Woooooooooooooojoooooooooo\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\hhooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Day 143 - Happy Birthday to me

2006-11-06T15:55:00.000Z

And I'm onto my seventh can of Carlsberg now.

Woooooooooooooojoooooooooo\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\hhooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Day 141 - Quest for a drink

2006-11-04T06:25:00.000Z

And I thought Databases 101 was tough...

I was over at Slade's house to talk about the structure of the database we'll be using for our game. Last week there were only 8 tables, but after adding this really cool feature, it has bloated to 23 tables... and more. His finger drew a circle at the bottom right corner of the screen. "We've yet to fill up this part."

"Well at least I only have to do this once," said Slade while typing a five-line SQL query, "server side code will take care of the rest when the database is done." I didn't really like the sound of his keyboard, it's like scraping your teeth with the back of a spoon.

It all started when we were outside having dinner at this nice Chinese restaurant (Not a nice place, but nice food). I can't really remember how the conversation went, but the idea came when we were talking about how to get playtesters.

Me: We'll be having 180 cards in the first release. That's a bitch to balance.
Slade: Yeah, but good thing our game's online... screw playtesting, how about we just let the players make whatever cards they want?
* lightbulbs *

Of course, we don't let players create whatever they want, but more of the flexibility to 'customize' their own cards. Instead of getting 11 or 15 cards from a booster pack (Which most of them will end up in the cat litter box), he'll be getting some 'stat cards' and 'ability cards' as well. Most creature cards would then have empty 'ability slots', which then the player can insert stats and abilities into them, whether outside of the game when he's forming the deck, or inside the game where the effect would only last until the end of the game. Slotting the ability outside of the game would permanently imbue the effect into the creature, thus deleting the ability card from your library of cards.

A simple idea, but a pain to design. I guess we'll need more playtesting this way, but what the hell... the idea is too cool to pass on.

Back to present day. Slade had just Control-Home-Backspaced the eight-line query.

"You want some green tea?"

"Actually I'm in the mood for something cold and sweet."

"I don't have cold water."

"Let's just go get some Sprite and put green tea bags in it."

"... You sure it will work?"

"I dunno, let's try."

It actually tasted pretty good, but the sourness of Sprite sort of masked the fragrance of the green tea. The other problem was this:

The tea bag was immediately filled with gas and refused to sink. We had to use a spoon to keep it down there.

Perhaps not the best use for two green tea bags... next time we'll try Earl Grey.

Day 123 - Media mediocrity

2006-10-17T08:59:00.000Z

I was sitting in the car with my sister last weekend, going to new shopping mall on a boring and stiflingly hot Sunday.

And that's when I heard that song.

"Who sang this crap?" I asked my sister. She replied with a name of some currently famous Taiwanese band:

飞轮海, read as "Fei Lun Hai", is made up of four guys ranging from 20 to 25 years old. Apparently, they have starred in some serials and movies, one them won some modelling competition, and their first album sold like 50,000 copies.

But their singing sucks.

The first sentence of that song, "Please Leave Me Before I Regret", displayed a shaky voice, probably unsure if he hit the right note. I thought I heard it all until I reached the chorus. Four voices, sounding like they were singing while running wildly because their backs are on fire, exploded from the speakers. Harmonics were thrown out of the window. The timing wasn't synchronized. In short, it was bad.

"People actually buy this crap?" I asked my sister. She shrugged.

The Yahoo! HK music review site received 42 reviews for the album, all giving it the maximum 5 stars out of 5. Two-thirds of the reviewers commented that "[so and so from the band] is cute", or something along those lines, paying no heed to the horrendosity of their singing.

I so wanted to keel over and moan, but I couldn't, because I was in a car.

I'm quite aware of the complaint among game developers that gamers nowadays care more about graphics than gameplay... but seems like it applies to the music industry as well. I mean... what the hell? If I buy a CD, I'd listen it. I can't see any of those so-called "handsome", "cute" guys; I only hear post-teenage whiners that sound like they're drunk in a karaoke bar after a can of Tiger. So does it matter so much? Hell, why did the record company even sign them up for an album?

If that's what the new generation wants for the entertainment industry, I'm not giving them that.

Day 116 - The language gap

2006-10-10T07:16:00.000Z

Project KEO is a project where a time capsule will be sent into orbit, stay there for 50,000 years, and drop back to Earth in year 52,007 A.D. Inside it are high-definition DVDs containing messages from people all around the world, as well as photographs, maps and recorded sounds of the current world.

I think it would be pretty fascinating to receive a package from your grand ancestors. Imagine opening it up to see some crazy ass moon language written on it.. and proceed to use the disks as frisbees.

Ever since civilization started, written and spoken languages have been evolving. New words are added into the English language every now and then (mostly portmanteaus and technology-related terms), and some of them grow increasingly obsolete (How many times have you seen people use the word 'perchance' or 'exacerbate'? Or typing 'you' instead of 'u' in online forums and chatrooms?)

With the (relatively) stable global relations and international communications, I think it's pretty crazy to come up with a new language and ask people to use it. The global language wasn't that successful either.

Thank God for creative literature, we have people speaking Klingon and Sindarin.

Day 109 - A hundred years hence

2006-10-03T20:30:00.000Z

As a game designer, a fundamental part of my job is to lay down the setting for the game. It's like decorating a stage for a play, you choose the backdrop, lighting and props for the actors to present the story. Without the actors, the stage is but a still three-dimensional place; actors are needed to bring the stage forward temporally. On the other hand, actors can still act without stages, though there will be this inevitable feeling that there's something missing.

Our game takes place a hundred years from now, in a parallel world similar to Earth. I've always been excited about great leaps in technology, but the problem was: Was a hundred years too short for a technology leap?

I spent the whole of today reading articles in Wikipedia about space elevators, transhumanism and a few dozen other related subjects. How far can a hundred years of unmarred technological advancement bring us? Will we finally get our time travel and space vacations? Will mankind decrypt the code of life and break the curse of mortality? Those are the big questions to ask. To really flesh out a plausble futuristic world, however, there are some other smaller points to note:

- Politics. On a bigger scale, are there still any more countries, or has the world united under one government?

- Language. In a hundred years, has 'you' finally degraded into a single letter? What are the new euphemisms for 'goddamn'? I want 'ng' and 'th' to be one single letter, though.

- Fashion. In a hundred years, are cotton T-shirts still available, or everybody wears skin-tight synthetic fiber suits, like the Jetsons? Would technology enable one to design and create a new outfit every day just for herself?

- Popular culture. In a hundred years, do people still listen to iPods, or they have neural implants to playback music, using a partioned part of the brain as storage? How many more features they can add to mobile phones, or will there be mobile phones at all, now that people can communicate telepathically?

- Jobs. With the advent of robots, are people still required to stand in assembly lines? My personal belief is that barbers will never be obsoleted.

- Education. In a hunred years, will primary school students be required to know how to maneuver a flying vehicle? Do people still go to school at all, or can they just download stuff into their brains?

Well, I'm pretty sure that there are a lot more things to consider. For me, I just start sketching the world out of several major points, then slowly going in detail as well as patch up any missing aspects I forgot to look into previously. And hopefully in a hundred years, if the Internet is still around, people can laugh at my crazy predictions.

Day 26 - Card layout

2006-07-13T19:41:00.000Z

This afternoon I tried sketching landscapes - My stylus felt stiff, it's been quite a while since I last drew anything.

At night Kwang came to discuss future playtesting plans. He just started his Masters course and wouldn't be able to come as often. And since I have the style guide to prepare, we would have to let other people playtest it for us. Volunteers anyone?

Well, not just yet. There are some legal stuff we have to prepare first. Yeah, the NDA.

Another lesson learnt: It's not until I design my own collectible card game that I appreciate the work put into the card layout. It's not a priority in the plan as of now yet, but Kwang and I thought we should just go ahead and design it, since he happened to be at my place.

It's getting late and I haven't scanned the sketches... I'll give a commentary on our layout attempts tomorrow.

Day 25 - Cats and burgers

2006-07-12T20:35:00.000Z

So I was at the hostel cafeteria having my dinner.

There was something special on the menu, resulted from... I think I'll just tell the story from the start. Complex sentences are terrible for story-telling.

So there was this stall that sells drinks and snacks (burgers, nuggets etc). They tried selling chicken chops for a while, but the cafeteria admin received complaints from the other stalls - Well, it wouldn't be fair to sell both drinks and main courses, it would just put the other stalls out of business.

So what did the stall owners do with their stock of chops, since they can't sell anything more filling than burgers?

This, my friends, is genius:

It just made me laugh.

And here's the closest picture of a cat I could get. Yeah, that's the eye.

Don't bother turning up your monitor's brightness, it's just a crappy photo.

Day 24 - The Melancholy of a Game Designer

2006-07-11T16:32:00.000Z

It's been a long weekend.

There wasn't much on Sunday, because well... it's a Sunday. I did recompile the list of playtest cards though. I really, really think I should not be sleeping late than 3am, else I'll be just stoned throughout the day. Being stoned on a Sunday sucks.

I woke up to a Monday morning shivering, it hasn't been that cold for quite a while, but at least it's better than if it's too hot. I came out of the hot shower, still shivering. I liked my days cold, though probably I should resume the habit of eating lunch. My pants were feeling somewhat looser.

Slade and I left for downtown in the evening. We went to meet Cedrick, a film guy from Hong Kong who had working experience in ILM; and Yann, a games lecturer from a local university. We chatted over a couple of beers, pretty much about what's there for us game developers in our country.

As usual... not too much news (if there's any news at all) from the government side, so we're probably (most likely) screwed if we continue to wait for government grants. Cedrick left us with the advice of "make do with what you have", which... isn't exactly comforting.

Well, it does suck to be stuck in a 'creatively dead' place. Kids here grow up with homework, not dreams. I guess I'm pretty lucky to have a father understanding enough to allow me to pursue games design.

Oh, Kwang's concept sketches came in on Monday. Here's something quick:

Day 21 - Saturday

2006-07-08T19:15:00.000Z

I never appreciated Saturdays until I really got down to work.

Well, I took the trouble to make sure I slept late on Friday night, which would most likely disrupt my sleeping schedule.

Anyway, today went by pretty uneventful. Kwang woke me up this afternoon with a phone call, alerting me to check out the Axis and Allies collectible miniatures game.

Honestly I've never had any interest in miniature games, or any figurines, as my desk is cluttered enough. I've seen a couple of A&A games being played at game conventions, but that was all I know about it.

After reading the rules manual, and being honest again, I didn't like it.

I never liked the idea of 'inbuilt' rules, meaning the rules of a game that you need to know before being able to play the game. For our game, I spent about ten minutes trying to explain the rules to a volunteer playtester. Too long. It should be two minutes.

Kwang agreed me on this. And now, after feature adding... it's feature-slashing time.

Day 19 - Playtesting starts

2006-07-06T18:15:00.000Z

It's more like 'preparing the playtest cards starts'. What we did was bought a bunch of sticker labels, and stuck them to my extra Magic: the Gathering cards, then used a pencil to write on each and every label. That alone took 3 hours.

But the discussion before that was awesome. Kwang came over to my place at around 4.30pm. We sampled a couple of CCGs (Fullmetal Alchemist, Naruto, Gundam War and the old G.I. Joe CCG) to get some more ideas. There are several cool new features which I can't wait to test out, but I'll need to flesh them out in the design document first. (Yes, we told ourselves to stop adding more features after that :p)

It's going to be a rush to finish up the gameplay doc by this weekend, there's quite some playtesting to do. But with those playtest cards ready for playing, I could just give them out to volunteer playtesters. Now if only I could find some way to duplicate them instead of writing them all over...

Day 18 - There's actually a Day 17

2006-07-05T15:02:00.000Z

Yeah, it's there. But I'm not showing it... yet. I'm keeping it as a draft post for now, for personal reasons. However, I'll show it out in time.

But in short, Day 16 was the worst day of my life, and Day 17 was not exactly the best, but it was an important day. It gave me a new sense of direction, and brought me back to the right path. I'm still using the pencil case that I got from junior college, there's the school motto painted on it - 'The Best Is Yet To Be'. Come to think of it, I haven't took a good look at my pencil case for a while.

I woke up early today and felt very good, after a whole week of not sleeping at night. It still took me quite a while to start working after idling for a few days, but after a while I picked up the pace. Frankly, starting again was hard. I fought hard against myself to stay on the chair. I decided to look for salvation before it was too late, that I might just fall back into my slump.

Fortunately, my aunt was there for me. I was always keeping things to myself, especially from my parents. But my aunt was my confidant. I spilled everything to her. And she prayed for me.

I regained some confidence after that. I wrote a little document (well, 5 pages) about game balance ad showed it to a colleague. He enjoyed it. We talked on our game for a while, and out came so many more great ideas that we were so excited to test it out tomorrow. Suddenly the path seems clear.

Right now, I can't wait to sleep, so that I can wake up the next day fresh and excited. It feels great - no, AWESOME to be a game designer. And by Saturday, I'll have the design document ready. I can't wait for that day either... just to think that so many people will be playing this game not too far in the future, but loving it!

I love my job!

Don't you envy me that I'm the designer for the best game in the world?

Day 15 -

2006-07-03T22:44:00.000Z

Nothing much happened today. Well there is, but my arms are too tired to talk about it. I'll come back to the incident another time.

Day 14 - More about buses

2006-07-02T17:09:00.000Z

I mentioned in yesterday's entry that the bus service in my area will be free until Monday, that's why I went out again today.

However we missed the stop, costing us another half an hour and ending up in a different mall. I admit it was my fault that I didn't ring the bell, but I thought he knew I was going off, since I asked him where were going to stop a minute ago. Being an express bus that has only two stops along the way, I also expected him to open the doors even if it seems like there are no prospective passengers. Like the trains.

So what's the lesson here? Good services can be ruined by bad service providers. Even though I have myself to blame, the fact that the driver didn't seem to care about his passengers left a bad impression to us. In fact for the rest of the journey, we were talking about how the bus company needs more friendly drivers.

But here's another lesson for us. Don't assume what other people know what we think. A popular saying is that 'assuming' makes an 'ass' out of 'u' and 'me'. It held true - the bus driver probably got confused, and we got angry. This lesson can't be any more appropriate when applied to my relationship with my girlfriend. We had a lot of conflicts which boiled down to "I thought you'd knew!" The fact was, neither side was.

Slade and I have been trying to apply Lesson #1 to our game. Our game is going to be massively multiplayer, however it won't need a downloadable client. I'm not saying that clients are bad, else every MMOG company wouldn't be using them.

Our aim is not just to give the player a good gaming experience, but to give the player a good gaming experience and the ability for him to share the experience with his friends instantly. His online friends will be able to see what is he doing in the game which he is playing. Real time. Without downloading a client. We want a game that can be carried around anywhere, so that it can spread easily (ideavirus, ideavirus).

Tomorrow's club registration day. I guess I'll be having a lot of fun there. More updates on that later.

Day 13 - Of buses and viruses

2006-07-01T22:12:00.000Z

I was going out for dinner with a few friends before I noticed a small sign hanging under a tree - Bus rides are free until Monday.

Whoa, sweet! So needless to say we took the bus, which was spanking new and had egg-shaped hard plastic seats. The seats were quite comfy, at least they didn't have that weird smell of those old buses with cushioned seats. A man wearing a bright orange T-shirt that said "Ask me!" (Which honestly looked like something lewd when viewed from an angle) was busily giving out brochures. After a chat with that guy, apprently they had revamped the transport system in that area - All buses there go to a central terminal now.

The terminal seemed very new - in fact the new bus service had just started today - and it was just... that. A bus terminal. In the middle of nowhere. The only form of refreshment was just a drinks machine, but according to OrangeMan they will be gradually upgrading stuff.

Later in the night I was reading 'Unleashing the Ideavirus' by Seth Godin. (The book is free to download. So why don't you go get a digital copy now... I mean, after you finish reading this entry?). I immediately recalled what I was doing right after I got on the bus earlier that evening - I texted up my friends, telling about the free bus services we're getting. And indeed everyone sounded happy about it.

An ideavirus in motion - "Hey, let's come take free bus rides!" Five of us will be taking the bus to a shopping mall we've never went before for dinner tomorrow. I'm not sure how far my part of promoting the service would spread, but I had effectively contracted the virus and became a 'sneezer' (As Seth puts it), one that influences others to try out a service or a product.

For a small game company like us, 'sneezing' seems to be the only way to go. We are definitely unable to advertise our game in prominent websites when it's done, so we would have to spread our game out. It just happens that the gaming experience becomes even better when there are more people playing it.

In that case, our aim is not just about creating a good image for our potential customers, but to create a good experience for our existing customers, so that they have good things to tell about our game. Testimonial evidence. That's how multi-level marketing schemes get new recruits and diet companies sell their pills.

Slade and I have been discussing for quite some time about this issue - how to promote our game to as many people as possible. We're already getting somewhere, but I'm definitely excited about the journey ahead.

Day 12 - Realization

2006-06-30T23:02:00.000Z

Now that I believe in myself... how do I make it so that other people believe in me more than they believe in themselves? If I know the answer, I'd be king of the world. Well, that's where I'm aiming anyway.

Day 11 - It is a good day to die

2006-06-29T22:16:00.000Z

It's 6.13am here now, and I'm not asleep. My chest hurts and I'm ready to puke my lungs out. Must be the caffeine from that Java Chip Frappucino from Starbucks I had just now. I never knew I'm so sensitive to caffeine - it never did work on me. But still, the JCF was veeery nice and coffee-y/chocolate-y, though slightly on the pricey side.

Just this evening Slade, Key and I were talking to Brett and Kevin from GameBrains. Brett's the CEO, and Kevin's the art director. It was meant to be an IGDA bimonthly meeting, but the people there were just us, them and three other coursemates who are working on a game project themselves. We sat at two tables joined between Starbucks and San Francisco Steak, as half of us wanted coffee and the other half beer.

The GameBrains folks were nice guys, answering pretty much any question we were throwing at them, even though it wasn't meant to be a student Q&A session (Well, three quarters of the people there are students anyways). But frankly, I always felt rather unsettling when talking to them because hey, they're the ones 'up there' (Quite literally, their office is on the 62nd floor of the Petronas Twin Towers), but still I managed to keep it cool, though my intense stuttering gave it away quite easily.

The main topic of our conversation was switching between funding for our game and marketing it. One major issue we had not thought about was the legal issues and potential brand infringements - considering how fine a line is YouTube was walking on, it could be possible that a small startup company without legal backing like us could get sued easily. ("We're a cash cow for the big players," paraphrasing Brett.)

The other problem raised by Brett was the difficulty of marketing it online, because honestly, who has ever heard of Malaysia? (Like how Brett said it with animated gestures, "IT, Silicon Valley; Games, Austin; Animation, Japan; Movies, Hollywood.") One quote from Brett which impacted me the most was

"People believe in ideas, as such they manifest,"

or something like that. To a certain extent, it's true. I've been so close to demotivation so many times when I pitch my idea to people - "Ah, it won't work.", "I sounds weird.", "You sure you can do that?", "Why not do something else?", but they have not demotivated me because of one simple mindset that I have -

I believe in myself more than I believe in them.

To trust yourself is one of the hardest, most embarassing things you can do with yourself. People have been using public humiliation as punishment since ancient times - tattooing, tarring and feathering, pillorying and so on. People hate to be different, even if that means dressing up in a different color. Of course, I wouldn't want to embarass myself by doing something that will fail. And because of that strong faith in myself that I am able to point my hand at those people and say no, go fly a kite with your negative comments.

Bought 'How to draw fantasy landscapes' by Rob Alexander this afternoon. RM48 ($13.15) for 128 pages of full color, quite a good deal. Cheap art books aren't that easy to get.

Day 10 - Criticism

2006-06-28T20:08:00.000Z

I showed a blog to an old friend.

"Why aren't there any pictures?!" Was the first thing he said. I'm not much of an artist or a photo-taker, but I should have stuff to show around. Let's see...

Did I tell you that I like cats?

Well I really do, though I never had one of my own. I just go around taking photos of them with my camera phone.

Ooh, that one was standing up. My favorites are cat closeups. They're extremely hard to take, since cats usually run away if you go near them. So I catch them when they're asleep.

How cute. Ooh, the next one is a beauty.

One day, cats will rule the world.

Day 9 - Wide asleep

2006-06-27T21:41:00.000Z

So I bought a new network adapter. Just happened that there was a small PC-fair in college. And yep, it was a hardware problem.

I haven't been doing much gamedev for the past few days, mainly because we're slightly stuck at the point of getting financing. We had a plan worked out, but somehow we were informed that we're infringing on some obscure law. If that previous sentence sounded sketchy, that's because I don't really want to say too much about it, which might lead me into a lengthy rant of this country and its stupid laws.

I haven't been sleeping for three nights, though I make it up in the afternoon. I'm not sure how much longer I could last, the bed sure looks very tempting. Anyway, that's all from me today. Not much updates, sorry to keep you disappointed. Now maybe if I could just lie down for five minutes...

Day 8 - Bad news.

2006-06-27T01:35:00.000Z

My network card broke.

It started when I couldn't go online for a week. All the while my room mate has been able to surf freely. So I managed to fixed it somehow... by bridging together my LAN with a Bluetooth PAN connection. Whatever that means, it worked. And I'm not sure either.

So it worked fine until three days later. Once again it seems to be connected, but packets are going nowhere. This time, I had to unbridge the connections. How did I know? I tried everything.

The connection broke down in another two days. I was pretty peeved at that point, thinking someone might have played around with my network settings and stuff, but I wasn't really doing anything ('Anything' meaning surfing for porn, which my room mate does often. Well, maybe not now, but I guess it's already sort of a running joke). It happened to seem that whenever another housemate goes online, I get cut off. So naturally I was suspecting something, but I figured he wasn't that kind of person who would deprive people of their pleasure without telling them - in fact, we were still able to talk normally.

So I decided to take the big step and - reformat my computer. Speaking of which, I have not done that for some two and a half years. It went down to some trojan attacks a few months ago (when my room mate's computer broke down and he was using mine to surf for porn ;)), and it's about time I reformatted it anyway.

After backing up 4.5 gigs of data, the reformatting went well, but still no connection. The network card just died on me! It just stopped getting detected and that. One funny thing was, when installing the driver, Windows asked me if I wanted to connect to the Internet and get the files. Why, thanks a lot.

So how has that affected me? Well... duh? My work is definitely affected, that I can't be IM-ing with my colleagues or getting information from the web; I'm active in about 5 forums, and I had to say bye-bye to that as well; Most importantly I could not spend time with my girlfriend - I usually chat on MSN with her about four hours every night, and my sudden absence has caused both of us undue frustration.

The moral of the story? There probably isn't one. I guess you can say shit happens all the time.

Day 7 - Boring?

2006-06-25T23:26:00.000Z

Well it's a Sunday, so nothing much happened, except that I went home. It's been one month since I last went home, and I was missing it quite a bit.

One good thing I like about home is that there's a stable connection. For some reason my network here gets all screwed up, but somehow my roommate's doesn't. I'm a hardware/network idiot, by the way.

So other than that... I finally got that package my girlfriend from UK sent me. There's a whole bunch of stuff inside, including an AD&D Second Edition board game which her sister's boyfriend didn't want (which he gave to her sister, who gave to her, who gave to me). It was still Copyright TSR. Whoa. The whole box looked like new though, guess I'll safekeep it somewhere, when things reach that age, I guess they're not meant for playing anymore. (Nope, I won't eBay it either.)

Another highlight in that package was the PC version of Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg. I wanted to play it but I don't own a Gamecube. I've heard mixed reviews about it, but... even listening to the theme song makes me smile.

Anyway, big thanks to my dear girlfriend! ^___^

Day 6 - Already!

2006-06-24T18:37:00.000Z

By golly, I missed a day before I knew it!

Well, Friday night was a night of relaxation and sort, I was starting Steambot Chronicles, and before I know it the sky was starting to light up.

Steambot Chronicles, in a sentence, is Grand Theft Auto for kids. The game goes like this, you the protagonist wake up one day washed up on a beach. A girl in standing beside you, apparently she was the one who woke you up. Amnesia conveniently sets in and you forget who you are and how did you get there. So... after a brief round of introduction, the only way of the beach is being obstructed by a falling rock. The couple then conveniently find a scrapped 'Trotmobile', otherwise known as a ten-foot Gundam. Trotmobile lifts that rock easily, despite the rock being twice its height, and they make their way to the city.

From there on, it's pretty much up to you. There's loose storyline you have to follow, but for the rest of the time, there's plenty to do - digging for fossils, playing pool, perfoming instruments at streetside, battling trotmobiles in the arena, hauling goods from place to place, and other stuff.

The character modelling wasn't that well done, the characters' faces looked like they were drawn by some amateur. The trots were pretty sweet though. However as a whole, the 'feel' of the game just came together perfectly. Generally the whole place seemed faded and misty, like a distant memory. The absence of music while you're travelling on the world map also gave a chilling feel to it.

Another main attraction of the game was the promise of 'open'-ness, or on the cover, 'sandbox' style non-linear play. This was greatly evident in the choices you can make while communicating with others, and how others respond to you. The game also keeps track of how many times you knelt and kissed a woman's hand. Weird.

One downside of the game is that it lags too much and loads too often. The framerate slows down a lot when it comes to open spaces, and a small town of around 800 meters a side has three different loading areas. I guess that was one of the reasons I played for so long without noticing as well.

If you could bear with the lag times and the seemingly unpolished character models, this game is definitely a blast to play. I would recommend everyone to give it a try.

Day 4 - Personal improvement

2006-06-22T21:30:00.000Z

Today was quite an experience for me, as it was my first time joining a Toastmasters' meeting.

Slade, Key and I reached the meeting venue at about 6.33pm, three minutes after the meeting started. Looking at the schedule they had on projector, they were pretty punctual on starting meetings.

After a couple of introductions from the host and some anecdotes from the 'Humor Master', volunteers were called for impromptu speeches. I was the fourth speaker, after losing rock-paper-scissors to Key.

The topic I drew (from the three cards left) was 'The person I admire the most'. Being the asshole and narcissist I am, I took a pretty bold step by pointing the thumb at myself. Come to think of it now, it sort of felt like a Para-Para move.

After drawing a round of hearty laughter, my speech sort of rolled downhill after that - indeed, I have an attention span of forty seconds and by the timekeeper signalled one minute, my mind has gone blank and eyes glazing over the glare of the projector. I hastily muttered 'Thanks' and made my exit. There was a round of applause, but there was plenty of clapping in the whole meeting anyway.

Slade won the award for best impromptu speaker, and I believe he did deserve it. I don't think I'm any worse compared to him, however I really need to improve my attention span after a confident start. Having said that, I hope my blog eventually will reach Day 30.

I consider myself quite an asset to our team as I'm pretty much the 'idea guy'. It is Slade, however, who evaluates and elaborates on my ideas. Elaborating has always been a problem to me, evident in my college days where my essays barely touch the minimum word amount. It wasn't the matter of not enough points either - somehow it just sounds weird when I'm stretching it, probably like this paragraph.

Regardless, I had fun typing up the rough game design doc just now. It's quite a pain in the axe to type up a twelve-page document just to identify basic terms like 'player' and 'board', but it was just... fun. The touch is getting closer.

Day 3 - The Touch

2006-06-21T21:15:00.000Z

An uneventful day. I missed my alarm by sleeping right through it, I didn't wake up until bladder pressure forced me to get out of my bed, which was three hours later.

Spent the rest of the afternoon writing the treatment document of our game - we're showing it to investors soon. I had a hard time writing out the story, mainly because of my incoherence in writing. It occured to me that we did not put too much thought into it last time, rather focusing on the gameplay. Now that we've pretty got the gameplay concepts done, it's about time we went back to the setting.

What actually makes a game fun? Players don't look at algorithms and go 'oooh'. In fact, they can't see your algorithms. I don't think it's about the graphics either, my half-hour encounter with Final Fantasy 12 didn't leave too much of a good impression in my mind, but that eighty hours spent on Disgaea was an eighty hours well-spent.

I believe in the 'touch' of the game. A player 'touched' by the game gets hooked by it and never wants to leave. It's a rather abstract concept, and it's not easy to grasp it, but at some point of design you might (or might not) just hit that sweet spot where you'd clap your hands and shout in joy for a job well done. The setting for our game has came a long way since it was first conceptualized. Back then, I thought gameplay sells the game.

Well, it definitely does. But it makes a difference like putting Keira Knightley in a burqa or a bikini. The 'touch' comes when you know what clothes to put her in, send her on the catwalk, and everyone gives a standing ovation. Looking at us at this stage, we might only get some excited whispers.

Day 2 - Research

2006-06-20T22:20:00.000Z

Steve Pavlina's How to get up right away when your alarm goes off worked - I woke up at 10am, that's five hours of sleep. In fact I think I did get up a few seconds before the alarm rang, which I immediately stood up from my bed and turned the alarm off. It didn't keepme from falling asleep again two hours later though.

I was reading up on shogi (Japanese chess) while doing research related to our game. It turns out that other than the 'normal' shogi played on a 9x9 board these days, there were bigger variants that were obscured in time. And by 'bigger' variants, I did mean bigger - ranging from chu shogi, or middle chess, with a 12x12 board and 46 chess pieces; dai shogi (big chess, 15x15 board, 65 pieces); dai dai shogi (big big chess, 17x17 board, 96 pieces) to the ultimate taikyoku shogi, with a gigantic 36x36 board and a whopping 402 pieces. Believed to be created by piests in the 16th century, I guess they must be pretty bored.

Day 1 - Disjoint introduction

2006-06-19T11:05:00.000Z

Monday... not exactly the best of days, but not exactly the worst either. School just started, my room mate missed his morning class by waking up seven hours too late.

I woke up at noon today. France vs South Korea last night was pretty intense, though I expected SK to perform better. Oh well, 1-1 is still nothing to scoff at.

Did a couple of concept arts after I woke up, mainly finishing up what I had left incomplete before sleep last night. I have a Wacom Graphire 2 (four years old), and I mainly do all my drawings on it. I've sort of grown out of paper and pencils, though I have a handy ream of 80gsm in my bag, so that I could sketch stuff wherever I go.

It seems like a weird way to start a blog, especially one which sounds like I should be focusing more on my job as a game designer. But who the hell talks about work? Regardless, I ought to give an introduction about myself.

I mm a game designer (duh), turning twenty-one the end of this year. Other than working on our title, I am also pursuing an IT degree. My room mate and I share a rented room about ten minutes away from our university. I like cats.

I don't feel too comfortable talking about the game we're (me and a few other guys, not my room mate) making now. It's big, yes, and I wouldn't mind calling it the Next Big Thing, but I ought to have some modesty. Currently we have four people working on it, me being lead design. We should be getting more programmers and artists in another three months or so. I'm pretty proud of what we're doing, but I don't want to talk about it at this early stage.

My English teacher in high school told me that I ought to have more coherence in my essays, and he still stands true to this day. Let's just see if this blog gets any more interesting in the future.