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Story Design – Teaching Others What They Won’t Experience

What are you able to show to someone that they don’t already know? Can you make them change their mind about an idea or way of thinking because they’ve been indoctrinated into an idea for years? Can you prove a misconception, shine a light on the dark unknown that we know nothing about? Can you help us see a part of a life that we might never get to experience and help us understand that everyone has it hard, some in different ways and many in ways that we’ll never be able to experience firsthand but maybe we can get a small understanding from the wisdom of those who have experienced it?

There is something to be said about the power of storytelling. Having a story, filled with characters with flaws and faults, having well-meaning intentions fall through because they went about it in a way that played to the desires of another. Stories filled with morales to help us see our own faults and showing the dangers of being blind how those faults can affect others, be manipulated against us, and play to the prejudices and misconceptions that others hold tightly.

And what kind of views are stories lacking in telling? Stories that people that can relate to and that people have always related to will have plenty of stories with many points of view to get a clear understanding of their picture shown in the many hues that you can filter.

The stories that are missing, the ones that can teach us a better understanding of the nuances of the human condition, are the ones that are relatively new and where people have started to learn and understand only recently and who have the relatable vocabulary to express and the mediums that work best in portraying such a nuance.

Continue reading “Story Design – Teaching Others What They Won’t Experience” →

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A Look Back – Call of Duty – Modern Warfares

I just spent the past two weeks going through all of the Modern Warfare games in preparations for another project that I’m working on it was a struggle. The games aren’t particularly long, consisting of maybe 4 – 6 hours for the campaign, nor were the games particularly difficult, since I set it to novice difficulty just to get through the main plot points of the game. The struggle was stepping back into technology that was still infantile when comparing AAA development from a decade ago to today’s technology. The contrast to how Call of Duty creates a voice for itself through Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare franchise from its first inception to its last makes it hard to piece the games as a trilogy, in everything but name and characters. It makes it hard to go home to your roots.

Hot potatoes get dropped, butter fingers
Hot potatoes get dropped, butter fingers

The problem with calling it a trilogy is that there is normally some coherence between the games. Either a coherence in story, people, setting, tone; but as you play through the games, the story is consistent, albeit sparsely given; the people generally there; the setting somewhat there; but the tone is all over the place.

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Change Some Bits Around: Final Fantasy 7 – Aerith’s Death, Choice and Loss

Probably most people’s first memorable sad moment in a game, Aerith’s Death in Final Fantasy 7 sets the tone for the rest of the game as a means of explaining her death, giving it meaning, and having a renewed pursuit in stopping Sephiroth. Aerith’s death aligns everyone’s motivations, opens up character building arcs and allows for a resolution other than “Save the World” when it comes to the end of the game. We have a vested interest in vengeance.

Aeris-ffvii-fmv-altar

Originally, Sephiroth took control of Cloud to try and kill Aerith at the creation of the Black Materia with the ability to summon Meteor but was knocked out before being able to kill Aerith. When Cloud reawakes, Aerith has already run off to the Forgotten Capital in an attempt to summon Holy from her White Materia that she’s had tied to her ribbon. When Cloud and company reach Aerith, Sephiroth has his way with Aerith using the pointy end of his death stick and everything falls apart from there.

But let’s change some of these bits around.

Aerith’s death might be pivotal to the characters in Final Fantasy 7, but they also change the psychological states of many of them. And given the opportunity to change events, do you think the story would pan out the same way?

Continue reading “Change Some Bits Around: Final Fantasy 7 – Aerith’s Death, Choice and Loss” →

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Gaming on Data – League of Legends LCS 2015 Winter Split – The Best Around by any (K-)Means Necessary

LCS Winter 2015 Split has just finished for League of Legends and it’s time to start crunching some numbers to see how these top ranked players compare to one-another. Several Disclaimers: This post is a big graph heavy, but I’ll try and explain each of them as much as possible; there might actually be some code that some of you might want to skim over; all data was gathered from the Fantasy LCS view that is given for Stat tracking, so data might not be as granular as I’d like and not many features to compare against.

Stats given from Fantasy LCS

  • Average Points per Game (AP)
  • Total Points for the Split (TP)
  • Kills (KI)
  • Deaths (DE)
  • Assist (AS)
  • Creep Score (SC)
  • +10 K/A (KA)
  • Multi-Kills (not used)

Omitted Stats: 

  • Players who didn’t play the majority of the Split were omitted from analysis, 12/18 Games Minimum

Continue reading “Gaming on Data – League of Legends LCS 2015 Winter Split – The Best Around by any (K-)Means Necessary” →

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Thoughts On: New AAA Gaming Debuts, Promises and Expectations

New IPs (Intellectual Properties) come and go in any media. Movies have their John Carter of Mars and Vampire Academy. TV has their unpopular spinoffs like The Lone Gunman , Trust Me, and Rubicon. They try to capitalize on a franchise or build up a new one, they are either over-ambitious and  over-optimistic to the point where they just can’t live up to what they were trying to bring to the audience, or they are overly simplified and uncreative, bringing nothing new to the table and not creating enough substance to keep an audience entertained long enough to last even a half season.

Games aren’t any different than more traditional entertainment. There’s a build up of all of this news and press about how the game looks great and plays well but once it’s time for the game to be released, all of that buzz evaporates into a white noise of simply going unnoticed over the wash of other games that get released or older games that people go back to. Although, some games do tend to keep up with the perpetual hype distortion field that it generates for itself and they continue to at least pump out something every so often to the combined purchase power of a few million or so fans.

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Game Dev Tutorial: Twinery Day 2: Swigler enters the Hinterlands

For Twinery.org 2.0 Harlowe. Reference guide

This part of the guide is more for advanced use and more advanced routines from the reference guide. Because of this, I’ll be describing the use of what’s going on instead of a step by step guide of a “Let’s Code”.

For understand the basics of Twinery, check out the first post here: Part 1: Basics

Continue reading “Game Dev Tutorial: Twinery Day 2: Swigler enters the Hinterlands” →

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Game Dev Tutorial: Twinery 2.0 The Basics

Twinery.org

No I’m not a developer for Twinery, just someone who thought it might be useful for others.

So you want to build your own text-adventuring system from the ground up? Well, I don’t know if I’ll be able give you everything to make it the most interactive experience possible, but I did play around with Twinery enough to get a few features down that are necessary for making such a game.

Why Twinery? Twinery can be used for text-adventuring, pick your own stories, or even just to visualize non-linear story telling in a better way so you have a digital cork board to place all of the information and keep track of it in a more manageable way.

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Video Post: VO Review Grow Home

I got bored and made a video for the last post about Grow Home. It has a silly with video and voices. =)

Transcript can be found here

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Let’s Talk About: Grow Home

There is no competition, there is no worry, there is only your task at hand, to Climb and the Grow.

GoneHome_Climbing

Samu, the Zen practice of physical work, through doing, being present and in the moment, leading to an enlightened Zen state. Grow Home embodies this perfectly. Grow Home is the latest in Experimental Games from Ubisoft following Child of Light, and has you with the only real goal of growing a giant plant by plugging its seeds into the floating rocks with glowing Zelda beacons by climbing up the plant and riding the seed to implantation.

GrowHome_Seedling

Continue reading “Let’s Talk About: Grow Home” →

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