Bartman3010

I'm just surprised they have a soundtrack of Valkyria Chronicles in there. Not to mention they included music from the third game that'll never see the light of day outside of Japan.

That DS Wario game was absolutely awful. It was just really...unpolished, ugly and uninspired. That and Kirby Squeak Squad made me feel that Nintendo really did not care about handling some of their franchises during that one...odd period of the DS where they were putting out games...that's about it.

Of all those super-weird DS games though, DK Jungle Climber was one that was actually fun. It's predecesor DK King of Swing was an okay puzzle/platformer game, but Jungle Climber made the game feel more in place with the other DK games with the collectable aspect, and it's faster paced.

I thought we were past the era of "Americanizing" Japanese looking characters. I'm all in for Spike being the Ape Escape representation, but my oh my does he look terribly ugly. He looks like a bad Yu-Gi-Oh cosplayer.

I'm already not happy with the fact that most of these Fighting game "Veterans" they keep hiring are Evo tournament players and community managers. I may be unfairly pointing out something like Skullgirls, or maybe even dead wrong about it, but I'd fear that something like internal debating on equal character balance would be endless or something more gruesome.

They just strike me as egotistical, if nothing else. Plus besides Playstation All Stars and Skullgirls, theres not really that many other games that were made from tournament player development teams. Unless you count first person shooters.

I'll definitely keep up with updates as often as possible, considering I'm still kind of learning the ins and outs of Unity. Slow as they may be.

Wanted one since the original 3DS was announced. Its part of why I refused to transfer any of my DSiXL games to my 3DS. Why sacrifice those large screens? It's almost ridiculous.

That said, I no longer plan to keep my original 3DS because of this new development.

I am now curious as to which version I want. Supposedly the console versions have proper lighting, but for the screen alignment, my Transformer tablet seems to be the way to go.

Boy, I really wish they would fix how to amend images. It's better than Word Press I suppose...

Hey, I totally still visit this site. Quite a bit has changed since the last...two years I did a status check. Namely that I've now got a late night job that pays very well, my journalistic adventures have taken me to now working for Sonic Retro, and of course, that Persona 4 fan game I was working on.

It's...going, to say the least. But after looking over what my future may bring me to, I decided that the game would likely benefit better using 3D space and would help me learn about how games are made in 3D. So for the past year or so, I decided to cease working on the game in Multimedia Fusion 2 and learn about how to use Unity 3D and finally take a more serious look at programming. While Javascript probably isn't the most efficient form of coding anyone can look into, it certainly helps from a beginner standpoint. After several attempts at experimenting with how the object hierarchy works within Unity, I eventually decided to take my idea for that Persona 4 game I was working on that would grant me the ability for a deeper experience. No longer would players be confined to single screen rooms, no more object limits or having to awkwardly thumb through script code. You can see what all I had in mind for the game in a previous blog post in terms of design, but here I'm going to show what I've been able to do by making the jump to a more advanced game design suite. To give an illusion, I went from this to this:

Of course, I'm no 3D modeler or an artist, and I don't have anyone to work with, so randomly stolen placeholder models will have to suffice for now. The role of the protagonist and his partner will be played by Rayman and Rayman. You may recall that I was working on the idea of adding a second player to the mix, which is why there's a second Rayman in the first place.

Besides that however, now that I have 3D working space, I can take advantage of a more cinematic presentation. So not only does the camera follow the two players, it will center it's position between the two to ensure both players can see whats going on screen at the same time.

The camera can't go past this structure as both players run through this walkway, which can showcase potentially visually impressive environments. It'd be great to have it look something similar to what was seen in Persona 4 the Animation here.

In order to prevent players from wandering off too far, there are several hidden objects that prevent players from progressing until both have arrived at certain triggers to allow both to advance to the next area.

Of course, one of the big things about the project that I had to bring over from my old MMF2 project is the Action Ring. Luckily, it wasn't as much of a challenge to bring over as I had thought.

After experimenting with how grouping pieces of a model together, it allowed me to create the action ring in 3D space without sacrificing the detail I wanted, which involved having a "background" piece to the ring to ensure objects and people stand out. In addition, it always faces the main camera to ensure that you don't see how it actually looks.

The user interface is being created by placing objects in 3D space and having a separate camera view the material. Many games in the late 90's and most of 2000-2006 or so had HUD and UI displays by utilizing 3D space. While Unity has a GUI interface, I haven't really figured out how to get it to scale when playing the game at different resolutions. It's a cheat, but it works for the most part, until you see the material clip through other 3D geometry.

Sadly, there is still no game to speak of, and tackling an adventure game is not an easy task for an individual. I may end up dropping the Persona 4 aspect of the game and gather up a team to make a new game. The idea of having an adventure game with an easy interface that can be played with another person in the room sounds very exciting, of course, the project as it stands is only going along slowly, having to recreate assets in an entirely different game engine is no easy task, especially since I've had very little experience creating a game from a coding structure I'm barely familiar with, let alone designing an adventure game.

Perhaps I'm biting off more than I can chew, since I would probably benefit making smaller games before tackling something as ambitious as this project. But my interest doesn't lie in smaller, casual hits, and at the same time, I enjoy what I do, even if it doesn't really go anywhere, it's good practice, and good fun.

The industry as a whole will take time to grow up when games can be at an appreciable level than just man-children who erupt in applause during a God of War: Origins live stage demo. I'm surprised at a lot of the responses that articles like this, as well as Warren Spector who says that video game ultraviolence needs to be toned down. These arguments are right, but it'll take a long time before anything like that could happen. I design games myself. A lot of my friends and family don't want to take me seriously because of games like God of War and Call of Duty where they chalk it up to being over-the-top just for the sake of it or children who happen to learn words like "Fuck!" and "Shit!" due to negligent parenting.

Can we have attention given to a triple-A game without having it being a gritty war shooter? It's like the Quake 1 development community only muddled around the same design architecture and told their friends that the Art Institute really is a way to make it big in their life. (Then they get stuck making CG commercials for insurance and heart-medicine, I'm sure that was part of their big plan.)

Really now, there's many places this argument can go to, but it's been made clear by some people that they like it just the way it is. No one was really threatening to destroy video games, merely just asking for variety. Some of us like to share our hobby with those who are too intimidated by this industry because of the state that it's in right now.