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I love that each KOTH map has 3 different areas and isn't the same place for every round


I don't know if they buffed Tracer but I am way better with her now. Also the changes they made to Bastion make him way better for offense than before

i didn't get any romantic feelings between rey and finn. yes finn was asking about a boyfriend at the beginning i'm sure he finds her attractive but he didn't seem to be romantically pursuing her and rey didnt' seem interested at all. i think she cares about him as a friend, he almost died.. i don't see a kiss on the forehead of a guy who might be in a coma as something romantic

Rey's been abandoned for pretty much her entire life, so when BB-8 says that it was Finn's idea to come back for her it might have been the first time that someone had ever come back for her.

I'd believe that there may eventually be a romantic interest but right now I think Finn's probably the only real friend she's ever had, which I imagine means a great deal to her

do people who are in San Francisco in july want to hang? 

Put me down for a solid maybe. I'm supposed to start working July 6 but I've also got to go apartment hunting, but maybe mid to late July would be better for me

I seriously love how the cars reflected the character's personalities as well

This movie was so incredibly freakin' good.

And from the technical filmmaking level: It's amazingly good as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnOrinHibsc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgkawcew2u8

I, too, am moving to San Francisco in July!

DDWIWDD (Dan Deacon "When I Was Done Dying") | Off The Air | Adult Swim


This is pretty darn cool-- Adult Swim asked a bunch of animators to animate a bunch of different parts of a music video

there are 2 Texas chains that I am a huge fan of:

Rudy's BBQ and Chuy's (Tex Mex). Lockheart is also supposed to be the BBQ capital of Texas. West of Austin are a bunch of towns with strong Scottish and German heritages (so there's a lot of good beer and sausages out that way, if  you know what I mean)

and then Austin has a lot of food trucks, ranging from taco trucks to maine lobster sandwich trucks to trucks that serve really fancy spaghetti  (I'm going to maintain that you haven't lived until you've eaten  carbonara out of a food truck in what looks to be someone's back yard)

rtil if you drove a mere 5 hours south you could have seen this amazing part of Texas:

Can you give an example of what you mean by "feeling"? Like:

"It should be smooth"?

"You should feel very heavy while moving"?

"You should feel like the world is very big"?

This is where I wish I could remember what the lady giving the presentation said exactly. I know I helped shoot a video for that talk so I'll contact a friend who helped organize it to see if that video is online (as my google fu is turning up nothing)

But the "feeling" here is really a very high-level design goal-- these shouldn't directly describe gameplay, but gameplay should help create this. For Journey it could have been something like "Create a sense of wonderment through exploration and cooperation"


Throwing out other examples here: "Create a sense of urgent need and panic through a lack of resources," or "Make the act of building and creating satisfactory," or "Make the player love the light and hate the dark"

oh wait, what? I totally missed that presents have to be digital (I need to be a dick and pull out of this then, sorry!)

As someone who works in the video game industry

will this be on your tombstone?

Thanks, Thor. What exactly do you mean by minute-to-minute gameplay?

minute to minute gameplay as in how exactly you want your game to go when a player's playing it. How should a player feel when playing it? Do you want an easy going side scroller that's mostly story driven? Do you want a really twitch based bullet hell sidescroller where the player regularly needs to dodge around and jump? What are the important gameplay elements in your game?

From there, the design can drive the art. Mirror's Edge, for example, colors all of the interactable environmental elements red to draw your attention to it against a mostly cold palette. For Infinite Crisis, because we had so many effects that we needed to provide gameplay feedback for, we came up with a color language of sorts: we made all "negative" looking effects dark purple, all healing effects green and white, all poison effects dark green and yellow, physical attacks were red and gold and magic/power attacks were blue (there were exceptions of course). Perhaps in your side scroller, yellow platforms maybe break 2 seconds after your character jump on them, green platforms serve as healing areas-- regardless of what your gameplay is, designing the art to provide gameplay feedback will help out your players' overall experience a ton (I once heard a story about one of the earlier FPS games (I believe it was Unreal edit: whoops, it was Bulletstorm) where the artists tried to make their exploding barrels green but playtesters never used them because they didn't know they would explode. Once they made the barrels red, more of their playtesters started shooting more of the exploding barrels in the game)

Also, I saw a talk at the Boston Festival of Indie Games given by one of the heads of That Game Company (the guys behind Journey) and the overall message of the lecture was "Keep to a feeling throughout the entire process"

They wrote down what they wanted the feeling of the game to be for Journey down on a big ol' whiteboard (just a sentence), and whenever they had a question about gameplay or art, they asked themselves if what they were working on helped push towards that thing they wrote down

As someone who works in the video game industry

will this be on your tombstone?

Not that, it'd probably be something a bit more profound like "feeerrrt"

Actually I'll take sausage and caramelized onions OH WHAT A 90s REFERENCE?!

As someone who works in the video game industry right now:

-Gameplay is god. Art and music is secondary. Make your gameplay fun with boxes and placeholder art first, then worry about the art later. (once your gameplay is down, set up the architecture so that you can hire an artist to plug in stuff later. For example, set up the programming with placeholder art for calling in a character's run cycles, get that working, then hire an artist to draw out the frames later)

(we call these placeholders "stubs" by the way)

-Know your ABC's: Even the biggest teams need to prioritize features. For smaller projects, list out all the tasks you'll need to do to make a game and then hit the most important stuff first:

A level tasks: Your game will not function without this. Movement code, collision detection, attack code, basic UI elements, MINUTE TO MINUTE GAMEPLAY (VERY IMPORTANT), etc.
B level tasks: This will make a huge impact on the gameplay but ultimately isn't needed. Art and music actually fall into here (because you should be able to play the game with all different colored boxes). Stubs/placeholder art typically fall in here, but only if they provide gameplay feedback
C level tasks: All icing on the cake. Animated UI elements, camera shake, lens flares, cinematics


Get your A level stuff done first, then your B level stuff, then if you have time, your C level stuff

this is all I can think of right now but feel free to hit me up with any questions otherwise

I guess I'm in!

Maybe I was turned off by the sheer amount of monologuing

there was a TON of unnecessary monologuing in there

Okay so maybe  I'm just really, really picky. Spoilers follow:

[spoiler]
The plot of the movie made no sense at all to me.

The villain's motivation was that he wants to conquer the world. Everything he does is consistent with wanting to conquer the world using dragons and controlling them

Hiccup's motivation was that dragons are friends. He wants to convince the bad guy that dragons can be your friend.

Befriending dragons has absolutely nothing to do with trying to stop this guy from conquering the world, but it's really the POWER OF FRIENDSHIP(TM) that saves the day in the end. It really felt like the movie should have been more about "Humans should control dragons" vs "Dragons belong to no one and they chose to be our friends" because at least there's two opposing world views that clash.

To me, the entire plot kind of felt like fan fiction... Unlike the first movie which had fantastic storytelling that evolved naturally and was driven by the characters, it really felt like this movie had a per-determined list of plot points that they wanted to hit-- for example, how the bad guy know exactly where to attack the hidden dragon haven? Why didn't he attack before if he knew where it was? Did he read the script?
[/spoiler]

Okay so I'm not sure if I'm just friggin' picky about my movies and script these days, so before I say anything about this movie has anyone seen it and what did you think?

I saw this yesterday. The screenplay was really well written, the acting was fantastic, and the action scenes were all really well done.

I would see this again

and again

and again

I saw it a couple of weeks ago

It's really friggin' good

I did a lot of the effects for this character

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJyOhKbtgdw