QUICK HITS

I’ve got a bunch of things I want to say, but not a whole lot to say about them. Not enough to make individual posts, but too much to say in a facebook status update. So I’m shamelessly stealing the term ‘quick hits’ from The Electric Hydra podcast (or internet radio show) and presenting a bunch of stuff to you, with shiny bullet points for your reading pleasure.

• I want to make a game about peace keeping space marines. Non-lethal weapons only. You have to save people from violence and help them and build intergalactic wells or something. Why not?
• Procedural content is probably the way of the future, and there’s a great quote in there about games like modern Call of Duty being “the pinnacle of effort-based development.” What that says to me is this: there is also a limit to what we can produce through sheer effort, simply because anything beyond that is too expensive, or takes too much effort, or just isn’t viable for whatever particular reason. No one is going to make a game with a $100 MILLION dollar budget, unless they’re absolutely guaranteed to make money on it, which means selling an absolutely astounding amount of copies. Procedural content generation means a whole lot of different things, but primarily, it means making a game like Assassin’s Creed II for the cost of whatever tools you use to generate the cities and assassination targets.
• Slightly related to the above point, and mentioned in the second article (on the word content - yes there’s a slight space in the hyperlinks, you should notice this stuff, but I shouldn’t do it in the first place) is user generated content, sometimes called “procedural gameplay.” Stuff like Far Cry 2 perma-death runs, or the stories people make out of MineCraft, in which awesome play experiences are had by the players simply by making use of the systems a game makes available. This is also cheap, but slightly different from generation of procedural content.
• Ubisoft is hiring someone to help write an encyclopedia for Assassin’s Creed, and I REALLY SERIOUSLY WANT TO APPLY but I’m nervous, afraid of using resources like the Assassin’s Creed wikia and wikipedia itself, etc. etc. Being an adult is haaaaaaaaaaaaaaard.
• There exists a NES rip-off of Final Fantasy VII.
• A NES version, with the complete story and most of the features (Vincent and Yuffie missing, for example) of the PS1 game Final Fantasy VII.
• FF VII for the NES was originally available only in Chinese. So a bunch of Chinese programmers converted FF VII into Assembly and 8-bit sprites.
• A translation for this game exists. I’m too lazy to dig through the internet and find a ROM of it, but you can play it through this forum and if you REALLY WANT you can post a bunch on the forum and download it.
• The game probably sucks and playing it on that forum’s arcade thing is probably terrible, but you can play FF VII as a NES game.
• Bad games exist, and they probably shouldn’t, but some people just want to make money, not good games
• Why should your game exist?
• A Carleton graduate posted an article on AltDevBlogADay. I kinda want to say something, but I really can’t think of any good reason for doing that except that he went to the same university I’m attending. Along with like 20,000 other people. I’m definitely mentioning it to Jim Davies at the last meeting with his lab on monday though.
• I actually really like reading reasonably short post-mortems, and here’s an interesting one.

The moral of the story is you should probably read AltDevBlogADay. I love the idea of “GDC all year round” because there are a ton of awesome people with great stuff to say who wouldn’t get a spot to speak at a conference because they aren’t famous. And they sure as hell wouldn’t be given an hour to talk about best comment coding practices or the glory of “scripting languages” that don’t need to be compiled for ten minutes in order to test minute changes.