Facets of BrettW

Two steps forward… one spin around on the spot? Read more…

A little bit of actual progress this fortnight! Read more…

I was reading Tales of the Rampant Coyote the other day (great blog for indie game devs, by the way). They had ten tips for indie devs, which were all sensible suggestions, although not too surprising. But the point of those articles is to remind you of aspects of the job.

One that stuck out for me was to post periodic updates about your progress. I tend to mention obliquely my progress on my game The Day After every so often, but I think it’s time to change that. I find myself talking to friends about current progress but being vague about it. That needs to change. Read more…

Whoa, it’s March already. March 2013, even! I keep getting an embarrassing reminder of time every time I open Tweetdeck and see declarations that I was going to smash out The Day After in 2012.

Don’t fear, I am working on it. It’s just slow progress that usually doesn’t lend itself well to blog posts. I have some new (AWESOME) artwork to show off, but I need to do a bunch of boring things like tweak the website and fix this blog theme – I’ve lost my love for this WordPress theme and am convinced it mangles posts with pictures. *sigh*

So what have I been working on? Read more…

Just in case you’re wondering, I’m not dead. Just busy beavering away. My main project work has been on a teaser trailer for The Day After. I got the voice acting in, and it’s pretty cool. The thing slowing me down is creating a video in Adobe After Effects that is up to snuff. Progress with video editing is pretty slow – you might do a night’s worth of work and get 6 seconds of video. Sometimes not even that – it’ll be 6 seconds of a corner of the video. Nevertheless I’m pleased how it’s coming out so far. Fingers crossed my design skills are decent enough.

Which reminds me, I need voice actors to fill out a background of chaos. You may need to scream, yell, cry, groan, growl or sound pained. Only a few seconds at most.  If you have access to a good microphone, and want to be in the teaser trailer, contact me. I’ll let you know what I need.

The new artwork is coming along. Alice has finished all the new characters and there’s some action scenes to come. I love love love the new characters. Some were really tough to work out. Some were almost Alice grabbing the images from my brain and putting them on page. I plan to update the site to showcase the new art (as well as fix some minor issues) as soon as the teaser trailer is done. Any week now.

If you want some great games to play while you wait for me to get my stuff together, try these:

• The Secret World – Modern day MMO with excellent writing. It’s a nice blend of horror (standard and Cthulhu varieties) and conspiracy theories. The visuals are amazing. MMO aspects are standard, and maybe it’d do better as a single-player game. Nevertheless I’m having a ball going solo on most of the quests, and doing some with friends. The investigation quests are cool and have real puzzles that require you to think!

• Argument Champion – A small game made for a weekend comp. You are a debater supporting a particular randomly-chosen topic. Using the concept web from MIT labs, you try to link your topic with things the audience likes. It’s crazy, reminds me of an Edward de Bono creativity exercise, but is neat fun. You’ll see most of the gameplay in this in five minutes, but it’s still interesting enough to play through to the galactics.

• The Walking Dead – Oh my god. I’ve played a lot of Telltale Games before, and was getting a bit tired of them. The zany humour, the reuse of areas, the great voice actors with not much to work with. In The Walking Dead (based on the comics moreso than the TV series), they’ve fixed all that and made something quite special. The moral dilemmas are actually tough choices of conscience that have long-term impacts on your story, rather than “which powerup would I like”. The writing is dark and interesting. Puzzles are decent and it all hangs together really well. They’ve been collecting some very interesting statistics as well, though don’t look at them until you finish the episodes. Can’t wait to see more of this.

• Team Fortress 2′ Mann vs Machine mode – All the awesomeness of TF2 with a horde mode. Robots are rushing in and trying to deliver a bomb to your base. So you need to stop them. Great emphasis on teamwork and tactics. Server selection is a bit wonky at the moment, and the game is hard as hell. But it’s still very fun and rewarding. Plus it’s free to play (or a mere dollar or so to play on the Valve servers and get lots of loot).

I’ve been toiling away for a little while and I finally have something to show you guys. My gaming outfit Cognitive Discodance has a website, and so does the game I’m working on. I’ll let them speak for themselves.:

• Cognitive Discodance
• The Day After

Over the next little while, I’ll probably tweak these a little to fix bugs and add a little more polish.

Well holy mackerel, 2012 has hit and we’re already 12.5% of the way through. I’ve hit the ground running and am chugging away at my projects. I thought it might be a good time to tell everyone what I’m up to.

Read more…

Recently I’ve been working on The Day After, my board-game that became a board-game themed PC game. Primarily I’ve been writing the scripting language for it so I can start sewing in game mechanics and messing around with things. I’m using a scripting language because you can iterate (and debug) quicker that way. Anyway, working on the general gameplay model lead me to working on the scripting language, which lead me to nailing down some of the concepts I had floating around. One of them is Roles and balancing them for gameplay. I thought I might chat about that.

Read more…

I’ve been working away at my board-game-now-a-video-game game, with the working title “The Day After”. I’m starting to get some art and a website together, so I need to fix upon a final name. I was okay with the working title, though other people think it’s a little weak, which I concede. My girlfriend suggested the name “Aftermath”. I’ve been toying about with variants on that – “The Aftermath”, “<adjective> Aftermath”… “The Day Aftermath”

In case you didn’t know, I’m working on a multiplayer video game (with a board game aesthetic). The city has fallen into chaos after citizens go on an inexplicable homicidal rampage. You are one of a band of survivors who need to cooperate in order to survive until being rescued, potentially exploiting the situation for your own gain or perhaps uncovering the truth behind this disaster. I’m aiming for a survivalist horror feel somewhere in the ballpark of zombie films, natural disaster films and The Day of the Triffids.

This is where you come in. I need to decide on the name for the game. Have your say via the poll, or suggest alternatives in the comments!

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