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Today marks the negative one year anniversary of my marriage to my beautiful and brilliant fiancee, Carolyn. Now, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term "negiversary" it means that one year from today I am getting married. For some reason I just can't stop smiling today, despite some of my clients best efforts. In fact, everything just seems to be going right today.
I told my friend Steve about my negiversary and it got us wondering, if a one year anniversary present is paper, twenty five is silver, and fifty is gold, then what is -1? It was quickly decided that a negiversary gift should be digital. It's perfect! An intagible present for a wedding that has yet to happen.
Here is our first negiversary gift, given to us by Steve himself:
Well, originally in this space I had information about a contest, however there really was zero interest, so I abandoned it...
In other nerd related news today, I received an e-mail from CodeBaby asking if I would like to beta test for them, so the love affair is back on! My extra special thanks to whoever clicked on the CodeBaby link and alerted them to my existence...
Lets see, what else is going on? It seems like today is just stuffed with news! Of course, most of it is completely ridiculous little things that seem huge because I'm so fired up. For example I bought the new Beastie Boys CD today. Normally this wouldn't be news, but I got it for ten dollars, which if converted to American funds would be like them paying you to take the disc off the shelves. Even still, that wouldn't be news if I wasn't getting married exactly one year from today.
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In Edmonton, where I live, there is a little company known as Bioware. Perhaps you've heard of them. They are responsible for pretty much the coolest shit ever to grace the PC role playing world. Until Baldur's Gate my interest in PC role playing games had been steadily declining. Since then, however, it has been going strong.
As an a nerd living in Edmonton, an Ednerdtonian, Bioware has become a sort of Holy Grail. Every Ednerdtonian seems to know somebody who works there, and if they don't then they have probably at least applied for a job there once or twice. In my case, it's a bit of both. So when I saw a demonstration of CodeBaby's new web technology I was immediately excited. You see, CodeBaby is Bioware's sister company, and through this link I feel that while I might not be able to grab the Grail, by developing using CodeBaby's production package I might be able to at least have a look at it.
So what is this technology? It's pretty cool actually, it allows you to have a little 3D avatar on yor site that can help guide people through your page, answering questions and just basically looking cool. They are currently using this technology to showcase some of the martial arts moves for their upcoming game, Jade Empire. Now, I really wanted to get my hands on this, but apparently they do all the work for you. As great as that is for the customer, it's not so good for me, as it means I'll have to find another outlet for my creative impulses. Perhaps something like SitePal will be more to my liking...
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When I was younger I had a swiss army knife that had a lot of stuff on it. It had a saw, scissors, several different sizes of blades, a fork, and a spoon, among other things. We'd take family trips out to Shuswap lake in British Columbia and I would spend days sawing, whittling, and forking. I would use that knife for anything that I could think of. After a while the blades grew dull and the fork misshapen, but the one thing I remember about that thing was that I found it incredibly useful.
Several summers ago I went to Toronto for my best friend's wedding. As best man I received a gift, and that gift was a keychain sized swiss army knife and pen set. I carried it around with me for a while and then set it aside. Then one day I needed a small knife and it was nearby. I opened it up and in that instant was immediately addicted again. Since then I don't think I have gone more than two days without using it.
In fact, even though this knife has neither a fork NOR a spoon, I think that it might be even more useful than my old knife. In fact, yesterday on the bus I used it to stab the man with the horrible body odour who sat beside me. Hmmmm, actually, come to think of it, I think that only happened in my imagination. But I did use the knife to open my new game LaPucelle Tactics.
LaPucelle, so far, is a pretty fun game. It does have a lot of depth to it, and the art and effects are pretty fantastic. I can't really tell how well balanced the game is yet, but the game seems so polished that I can't imagine they would fumble on that point.
After only a few minutes of playing it my little brain began to race. As with many new games there are always tiny snippets that I think would be great to incorporate into the games that I am building. Ooooo, channeled portals, how would that work in a science fiction setting? Aaaaahhh, support attacks, why didn't I think of that when I was designing my game? Thoughts like this abound, as every new feature I try in the game that feels fun seems like something I should be using. I think that a lot of games follow this path, and that's what ends up ruining them.
You see, although my old knife was pretty great, there was a lot of junk in there that not only wasn't necessary, but was added in just to say that it had it. I mean, a spoon? Seriously. Both the spoon and the fork were incredibly hard to wash, and if, god forbid, and food slid into the knife it was pretty much there for life. It seems to me that this happens all the time with games. A quick glance at the selling points list on many games will reveal at least one or two things that seem to be on there only because someone in marketing thought the game would sell a couple extra copies because of it. These days it seems that a multiplayer component is one of the key things that needs to be on a box. I'm sure that many game designers have gone to their company with ideas for great single player games only to have them say, "Hmmm, okay, but how does it play multiplayer?"
Some of those games get made and then have multiplayer slapped on afterwards, like Unreal II, or Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Even though the multiplayer may have ended up being great in both of those games, it was still more of an afterthought, and in a lot of other cases the results weren't as good.
It's a fine line, and one that I am slowly learning to balance. It can be supremely difficult to realize that just because a feature is fun, doesn't necessarily mean that it's inclusion into the game you are designing will make the game more fun. Sometimes adding in that extra something isn't worth the risk.
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