Once more into the fray

The Left 4 Dead survival pack releases tomorrow, allegedly. I say that because absolutely every release date for downloadable content on Xbox Live seems to be off by a day, but we'll see. Regardless, I look to forward to any excuse to jump back into Left 4 Dead, I was sadly distracted by some shiny object or another and put the game down earlier than I would have liked. It's not that I didn't get into it, heck most of my favorite gaming stories I have in my arsenal pertain to it - the biggest being the time that me, Tetris and Myke discovered the hard way that Tanks can punch safe room doors down - but well, I think I need a new paragraph.

I have a disorder of sorts... no, that's wrong, let me start again.
I have many disorders of sorts, one of which being an unnatural attachment to experience bars. I for the life of me do not know why, but I love them, and every once in a while* they cause me to get carried away**. Left 4 Dead doesn't have any of these exquisite, yet largely meaningless, bars, and as such I played it like crazy for a few weeks and now hardly ever pop the disc in.

*Read: with great regularity
**Read: turn into a jibbering addict

This time will be different though, the survival pack shall be the salvation of my people, there will be undead masses to be slaughtered and leaderboards to ascend and... wait sorry, The world ends with you has how many distinct experience bars? And that many equipment slots, including one for food?

feeling pretty psyched

No, I don't need your Help.cab.

As I type this 3DSMax Re-installs, but for some strange reason the longest part of the installation seems to be copying and writing the Help cabinet files.
Well, I suppose it's a big program with many features, but that doesn't excuse that:
1. Most of it can be found on the Internet and better,
2. Blind luck can be used for the rest.
Now that that's out of my system I can get on and say that soon (no, not by Valve time this time!) we should have something to show, don't go getting your hopes up though, it's unlikely to be any of our arsenal of unreasonable weapons those are for later. Kind of like desert, but way more destructive.

Complete Protection From The Living Dead

Too long has it been since my last post, and little to no reason to I have for this. However, in my recent absence I have come across The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks. Although still in the first few pages of the book, it is making for an interesting read. It first came to my attention when my brother, Phil, brought the book home one day. Glancing through the book I read the differences between 'real life', voodoo and Hollywood zombies. After he had finished with it, the book found its way into my possession, so while I am out in the country tomorrow I will have a good delve into the watery depths of this, without a doubt, extremely helpful book. Who knows; some of it's 'teachings' may wind up influencing Zombietopia in small ways.

-I was sent by the Gods.

On the Origin of Species

Everything has to come from some where, every tree was once a seed. As game designers this is occasionally a fact we have to acknowledge, as tempting as it may be to just say "It just is" or "It's there because I want it to be" to everything. It's OK if you just shrug off gratuitous health pack placement because a player is about to fight a boss, "It may not make sense for there to be a pile of bandages outside this mobster's little hell hole, but if there isn't one the player will probably feel completely overwhelmed inside, and it does give them a heads up that something big is going to happen, so what the hell? let's just place a bunch there." but you can't do that for everything, and in my opinion this applies to one thing more so than anything else:

The antagonist

Specifically these key points:

• Who/what they are
• Their motivation(s)
• Where they came from or how they came to be

With zombietopia we've got it pretty easy for the most part. Our antagonists are zombies and their motivation is a desire to engorge themselves on human flesh. Simple enough so far, but where did they come from? How did they become zombies?
Once again, that isn't necessarily too hard, there is a multitude of tried and true answers to that question, the main ones being: Disease, Black magic or Brain Parasites.
We plan on trying something a little different though, I'm not going to let the metaphorical cat out of the metaphorical bag quite yet, but I'm sure at some point down the line we'll tease you all with little nuggets of our plans suspended from fishing wires.

As always, we aren't married to anything yet, which is the beauty of the early stages of a project. Also as always, if anyone wants to talk about their own idea for a possible 'zombie origin' or about how it's been done else where, feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an email.

brainwashed and cold

Happy 61st post

Well, as I logged in I noticed that this would be the 61st post made by us here in the office. Surprisingly not made by Iced or Myke, but by me.
This of course is not really a cause for celebration as most of these posts have contained little less than our musings during the week. Well, in any case HAPPY 61st POST SWG DEV BLOG.
Ahh that's better.
Now to my musings, I've been working hard and writing up a storm. Well not actually a storm, but rather the model loader. As far as I can tell it will load models, but it currently can do little with them.
That's it really from me for today, but I'm sure Iced is seething in knowing that I have Posted once more this week...