06.06.12 |
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In the midst of all these quick E3 news snippets this week, I appreciated this longer Wired story on Epic Games and the revolutionary effect of the Unreal Engine on modern gaming:
Then something surprising happened: Kismet [a simplified event scripting tool] democratized programming. “There were people who weren’t programmers but who still wanted to create and script things,” says James Golding, senior engine programmer. In other words, some artists weren’t content simply to draw the monsters; they wanted to define how they acted as well. Kismet let them do that. “When we got them a visual system,” Golding says, “they just went completely bananas with it.” This was off-label usage, though; while it was a great secondary benefit, Kismet hadn’t been designed for this task, so it was kludgy and slow.
And thus was born Kismet 2, which again converts tedious lines of code into an interactive flowchart, complete with pulldown menus that control almost every conceivable aspect of behavior for a given in-game object. Need to determine how many bullets it will take to shatter that reinforced glass? Kismet 2 is your tool. Once behaviors are set, they can be executed immediately and edited on the fly. With Kismet 2, Epic empowers level designers—the people responsible for conceptualizing the world—to breathe life into that world directly, rather than relying on programmers to do it on their behalf.
I knew gaming engines were crazy, but not that crazy.
06.06.12 |
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Kyle Orland over at Ars Technica played NintendoLand, one of the main launch titles for the Wii U. It has some nice touches, but there’s a learning curve:
The main problem with the five NintendoLand mini-games the company is showing at E3 is that they tend to require quite a bit of explanation to understand. Take Animal Crossing: Sweet Day, a slightly tweaked version of the hide-and-seek tech demo Nintendo showed off at last year’s E3. Before we got going, a PR rep had to spend about a minute explaining how the four players with Wii Remotes are working together to collect candy, how carrying more candy slows a player down, and how to drop candy when the antagonists (controlled by the GamePad) got too close. It’s not too complicated by video game standards, but it’s far from the five-second “swing it like a tennis racquet” explanation of Wii Sports, and it’s likely enough to scare away anyone not already versed in how games work.
The short version: there’s no Wii Sports equivalent when this thing launches.
06.06.12 |
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Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett recapped the winners and losers from day two of E3. Nintendo’s Wii U hardware came out as a clear loser:
It’s got some promise, but we’ve also got some concerns. The battery on the controllers only lasts for 3-5 hours. At most. Use two pads at once and the framerate for games drops by half. Throw in the fact that nothing shown this week looks anything remotely like a “next gen” game and the Wii U as a piece of hardware isn’t off to the brightest start. At least some of the games are coming along.
Graphics that barely match the current gen XBox 360 and PS3. 3-5 hours on a charge. Not good.
06.05.12 |
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Designer/writer Stephanie Rieger, talking about her frustrations while browsing the Camper web site:
All this wouldn’t be so bad if each shoe collection didn’t spawn yet another “Please wait” message, and yet another 20 second wait before i’ve even seen the shoes (…but that’s what the awesome copywriting is for…a collection called Flexibility, Together or Cushioning must surely be worth the wait!)
Eventually it becomes unbearable. Where is a good mobile site when you need one?
Like Jeffrey Zeldman noted in his oft quoted article several weeks ago, if we don’t design our content to be easily consumed, we’re toast – users will search for alternative consumption methods (e.g. Instapaper, PDFs, competitor’s web sites) almost immediately.
06.05.12 |
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Oliver Reichenstein:
The size of your body text doesn’t depend on your personal preference. It depends on reading distance. Since in general computers are further away than books, the metric size of a desktop typeface needs to be bigger than the sizes used for printed matter…
Graphic designers without Web design experience are surprised how huge good body text on the web is in comparison to printed matter. Mind you, it’s only big if you compare it side to side, not if you compare it in perspective.
I’m far from being a typographic genius but I’ve argued for years that most websites have their body text far too small. Mr. Reichenstein just provided the ammo I needed, along with a great article on web font styling.
06.04.12 |
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Designer Dan Cederholm interviewed by The Great Discontent:
Maybe it goes back to not being formally trained, but I always had this inferiority complex. I thought I was going to be outed as a non-designer and that someone would say, “Wait, he’s not really a designer. He’s not part of this club.” That isn’t true. The difference between someone who is a designer and someone who isn’t is simply that a person who is a designer has done it. My advice is don’t get hung up on labels or position or titles. It doesn’t just happen; it’s a gradual process. You can’t be afraid to jump in there and start doing it.
Dan’s a cool designer, one who’s been a huge source of CSS inspiration for me with his Bulletproof Web Design and CSS3 for Web Designers books. Naturally it’s a great interview, but it was this paragraph that really struck a chord with me. I’ve always pushed my career forward by looking for the next big thing and not being so hung up on my specific role. I’m not alone either; designers and developers are moving to smaller, multidisciplinary teams where being game for wearing multiple hats becomes critical.
06.04.12 |
Gaming |
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E3 news coverage grows at a seemingly exponential rate each year but much of it amounts to little more than regurgitated press releases. At this point there’s only a few sources I’d personally recommend. On Twitter I’ll follow analysis by Giant Bomb’s Patrick Klepek (level headed, great reporting depth) and Polygon’s Arthur Gies (highly opinionated). I’m counting on stellar video reports and recaps on Giant Bomb.
For more traditional gaming news I’m giving Polygon a try this year. I really dig the Verge style “story stream” – a bunch of related articles are thrown together in a single thread – and their heavy usage of full bleed, high resolution imagery. I have high hopes but it is their first year; if their coverage starts to lag I’ll jump to Joystiq, a mainstay of previous years.
For live blogs of the big pre-E3 press conferences (EA, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony) I’m going to start with Ars Technica. Ars has a no-nonsense, “just the facts” house style that should suit the play by play well.
Note that all of this news source speculation may be overkill: according to many experts this year’s E3 won’t generate huge news. The assumption is we’re a year before Microsoft and Sony release their next game console iterations. That translates into conservative behavior by game studios as they tackle the programming hurdles necessary for next-gen hardware. But who’s to say there won’t be some surprises?
06.03.12 |
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Because the Lost craze kind of passed me by with little effect, TV and film writer Damon Lindelof didn’t ring a bell with me at first. But now he’s attached as the main writer for Prometheus, so I checked out his interview on the latest On the Verge podcast. Really good discussion here about screenplay, TV endings, living up to prequel expectations, working with Ridley Scott and much more.
06.02.12 |
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Unique little design stories like these totally make my day.
06.02.12 |
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Today’s console games push computing to the limit. But as fidelity and realism improve, the gaming industry demands higher quality voice acting. Troy Baker is one such voice actor heavily in demand and Joystiq looks into how he got his start. It’s an interesting read:
Around 2004, Baker “stumbled” into doing car commercials, which led to a chance encounter that would shift his entire career focus. “Since we were doing album work at the same studio, it was just right place right time. So I started doing commercial work, and met Christopher Sabat who plays Vegeta in Dragonball Z.” Soon he was cast in a slew of minor roles throughout the anime and video game world: various iterations of Dragonball Z, bit parts in Lupin III, roles in One Piece, Bloodrayne 2 and Mega Man X: Command Mission. Things started to explode, and did so with a sonic boom when he was cast as the memorable Frank Archer in Fullmetal Alchemist.