Just got a new PS3 and MGS4, which completes my Next Gen lineup of systems. There’s little room under my TV now:
I’m pretty much the biggest GTA fanboy you can imagine, but Metal Gear Solid 4 is simply a better game. Thats all I have to say about that.
Good God, it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted on my own blog. I guess I’ve been busy moving to Austin and starting my new job. Also buying big expensive things like couches, xbox 360s, and big screen 1080p tvs. Life is good.
After settling in to the “real” game industry, I’m finding that I’m quite enjoying it. But since I live alone now and my xbox is broken (dirty disc errors be DAMNED!!!), I started thinking about starting a little side project to keep me busy in my down time. What I decided to do was start to plan and design a sequel to my game Diggkiller. I made that game originally under heavy pressure of unemployment, in the hopes that it could help leverage me into a job (guess it worked) and was only designed with the bare minimum of what I foresaw in my grand vision, and made sure I could develop it in a short period of time.
Now I have the luxury of having a day job and a codebase to work from, I can fully flesh out the game further and add new things that are just plain pimp. I want the game to rely less on the “Digg” gimmick and actually be awesome and fun and original as a shooter all its own. I can also refactor the shit out of my code to make it run smoother, and be able to add all kinds of modular stuff, and sick visual effects.
It would be cool to have input from people that might actually read this post about some cool custom attacks that people would like to see, based on the keywords in comments. Like “Ron Paul” could trigger some sort of “Money Bomb” attack. Stuff like that. If you’ve got ideas, post a comment.
Some things I am planning for DiggKiller 2:
- a way to adjust the game speed, to go in slo-mo or speed up, for crazy matrix-like explosions
- WAY better enemy AI, instead of just randomly shooting and moving, have cool patterns and behaviors for the different “classes” of enemies.
- deeper digg integration, and more dynamic topic categories (in case digg changes them)
- a lot more customization in terms of weapons. I’d like to create a completely customizable and upgradeable attack authoring tool, so people can design the speed and angle of their various attacks built from weapons they unlock.
- a much better scoring system. No longer simply the amount of “diggs” killed, but more based on how fast, and how Badass you dispatch your enemies.
- accounts that save all of your game data, weapons, custom attacks, and custom ship skins. And of course, high scores
- a shitload of cooler visual effects: missile trails, crazy colorful explosions, and whatever I can think of/implement
- better control scheme (no more caps-lock, shift, and control)
- music of some kind
- make everything very modular so weapons and custom attacks can be added with ease, even after the game is out.
- different themed backgrounds instead of the one “space” one
- a bunch more shit that I will think of later
The first diggkiller game got such an overwhelmingly positive response, I know that If I can do what I set forth here, it will be legendary. I really like the idea of having accounts and tracking everyone’s stats and having leaderboards for all sorts of different things. Hopefully I can do that with all the crazy php I now know.
Anyway, I’m gonna take my time with this one, and one day, it will be the MOST epic flash game/mashup out there.
First off, let me apologize to anyone who is reading this on kurtmargenau.com. This post is just personal stuff you don’t care about and is mainly meant for the the 6 or so people who will read this when it’s imported to facebook via rss feed. And for my parents, who will one day probably many months from now curiously google my name, and check up on this blog amidst search results of pedophilia games.
It’s my birthday, which will no doubt bring unprecedented traffic to my facebook page, so I figure I might as well fill in those “friends” who only check a fb page when it’s someone’s birthday, only because the link is there on their homepage, and wonder “oh yeah.. I wonder they’re up to”. They then browse around the profile page until they are sufficiently filled in on what this person’s life is like now, only to NOT leave a birthday wish wall post because you met once at a party and don’t think you know them well enough and leaving a post would seem awkward and stalker-ish. It’s cool, I’ve been there. I know all kinds of things about you people that I shouldn’t.
This post is going to be mad epic, so I’ll break it down with some sick bold headers. Btw, what the fuck? “mad epic”? Who talks like that? I’d like to thank my friend Jon Mingola, originally from New York, for re-introducing me to “mad”, which haven’t used since like, jr. high. And to Alex Albrecht, a god of podcasting, for hooking me on “epic”. You guys are assholes.
Backstory
I graduated from Georgia Tech in May, I wanted to work in the video game industry. Who doesn’t right? I had an EA internship under my belt, and I thought I was invincible. Except I forgot one thing: the game industry is an unrelenting bitch, and your ass will get chewed up and spit out while attempting to get a job in it. It doesn’t help when you’re a smug punk out of school that thinks he can write his own ticket because.. “Dude, I worked at the same studio they make Madden!”. Needless to say in my initial job search, I skipped entire parts of the country that are major hubs of the game industry just because I thought I didn’t want to live there. “Texas?.. fuck that the real shit’s in Cali!”. Many months and exasperated blog posts later, my game job search had resulted in a whole bunch of jack shit. It was about time to broaden my search when I got a call from SMS.ac, a “web 2.0″ startup in San Diego. Long story short, they flew me to SD and I had an impressive offer at my feet within a week. I had 24hrs to accept, and with my game job opportunities on life support, I convinced myself it was the right choice.
Good fuck. I was wrong.
Within I month and a half of working (”working” of course meant 14 hour days, every day, which I was cool with) at this social networking company, my position was terminated without notice. The official reason was “it’s not a fit” and when probing further into the specifics, the conversation shifted to “Don’t worry about it Kurt. You’re a great coder, you’ll get a pimp ass job in town somewhere in no time.” I suppose my “surprise” termination isn’t that much of a surprise given the company’s history and turnover rate, which can be researched further with a quick googling of the company’s name.
So I was out of work, and living with a $1000 rent bill every month. Being poor sucks. Sure when you’re in college you’re poor, it’s trendy because everyone is poor, and you hang out with your friends. That is a totally different experience than having zero income in one of the richest cities in the country. Luckily in my case, I had many ex-sms friends who suffered similar fates. I must say I have become very close with these people as we were all new to San Diego, and were all at a crossroads in life. You probably couldn’t put together a more random and ass-backwards cast of characters if you tried. My life is like a bad war movie:
There’s the aforementioned Jon Mingola aka “JMing”, straight outta Buffalo, driving his Nissan 240, who won’t shut up about cars and his Japanese girlfriend (like, who actually lives in freakin’ Japan.. top that anime n00bs), and will convince you that “you don’t know shit about shit”. And he’ll fuck you up in Gran Turismo.
Then there’s Sean Campbell, a laid back dude you’d swear was a local Cali mofo until you learn he spent his whole life in Nebraska. When he’s not breaking stereotypes, he allows you to pronounce his name “Seen”, which brings me more joy than many things in my life. In his time with me, he has learned the ways of the Albrecht, and all things epic.
Of course there’s Dwight Chen aka “D-Wight”, my randomly assigned apartment mate. At first glance, you’d be fooled into thinking this biology-studying, dual degree achieving, online PC gamer would fit squarely into that “quiet Asian roommate with no social skills” stereotype. Upon closer inspection (aka becoming friends with him), you see that you’re initial assessment was flawed, and you are now pwned as hard as you get from Dwight’s TFC teleport traps. His fps pwnage is only topped by his love of football, and hatred of OU (or “Blow U” or “Joklahoma” as I now know). Apparently this is required knowledge to graduate from UT.
Hanh Vu, the cute Vietnamese girl from Virginia Tech (who promptly crushed everyone when we found out she was married) is actually a cool chick. In between making fun of us guys for being losers, she picked up some guitar hero and cooked us authentic Vietnamese food. But I was happy my circle of friends wasn’t a total sausage fest. JMing and Dwight had someone to talk about Asian stuff with, and to make fun of me for my ignorance on all things of the Eastern world. I swear, you say that Thai and Taiwanese are the same thing ONE TIME, and you never forget it. Especially from John Lai, a NorCal bro who is.. um, one of those two things. I think. Sorry John.
I could never forget Mark Miller, the heavyset jolly Canuck who would tell us tales of sub zero temperatures (in Celsius) and how he attended “university” in the great white north. He never grew accustomed to the gorgeous women in SoCal, and how they “aren’t wearing sweaters”. Probably the funnest guy to be around that prefers to use recursion to solve any programming dilemma.
There were many other friends I’ve met in my time here in San Diego, and sadly most have moved back to their parts of origin most likely never to be seen again. As of this writing, only JMing, Sean, Dwight and I remain. And I’m on my way out.
New Job
I had only been off the market 2 months, and already I was back on it. I saw my termination as a very abrupt sign that I had been doing the wrong thing all along. I was meant to be in the game industry damnit! I vigorously pursued every possible option, and it wasn’t easy. When things were getting slow, I focused on making my own flash game. It turned out well. For cash during my search, I did some freelance web contract work, a Facebook app that just launched. It’s like Lite Brite.
The next thing I know, I have a new job as a gameplay scripter for Red Fly Studio in Austin, TX. The guys there are great, and they have a very indie vibe, and it just seems like an amazing place that I was meant to be at. For those game nerds out there, these guys are making the Wii title Mushroom Men, which you may have heard about depending on your level of game nerdiness and/or Nintendo fanboyism.
I’m starting in a few weeks, currently preparing to move to Austin, and I couldn’t be more excited to be back with old friends. My old roommate John Kelly works at the same studio, and some of my Tech friends have roots in Austin. The New Years party in ATX this is going to be SICK, as many are flying in from ATL. And I must say, as a person who originally shunned Texas, when I flew to Austin for my interview, I don’t think I’ve fallen in love with a city so quickly! (ok, maybe San Francisco..) I just have this feeling that I’m going to love it there. And maybe “the live music capital of the world” will jump start my musical interests. I currently use itunes to listen to podcasts more than I use it to listen to music. On last.fm, I’m the top listener to Leo Laporte! A sad state of affairs really.
DiggKiller in Prague
I figure I’ll use the rest of the post to talk about other random things. That game that I made, DiggKiller, is being featured in some art show in Prague. It’s called Mutamorphosis and my name is printed in the program under the “Web 2.0 Generation” exhibition. Cool stuff.
Micro-Reviews of Media I have Consumed Recently:
All these things have been reviewed more in-depth, and better, by more reputable people. But here’s my take:
Guitar Hero 3 (for PS2)
Pros: You can play as Tom Morello. Pretty cool song list. They added these little accents to notes that can be hammered on that’s kind of hard to describe. Plus, YOU CAN PLAY AS TOM MORELLO! This game is more challenging than Guitar Hero 2, it’s not even the last set of songs, and I’m getting owned, as are my fingers:
Very specific cons: You can tell this game wasn’t made by Harmonix. Little things like, choosing the difficulty AFTER you pick the song in Quick Play mode, and the High scores being shared between career and quick play, are all absent in this Activision-ized version. Plus the new battle mode is pretty lame, and you could tell the guys in the design room were like.. “we need to add a new mode.. lets have sick battle powerups!” This isn’t mario kart, it’s a rhythm game. Harmonix would be ashamed, you corporate shmucks.
Half-Life 2: Episode 2
Pros: Dude, it’s Half-Life. The story is epic, the gameplay is spot on, and you get to drive the car again! I think this one’s a little longer than Episode one as well, took me over 7 hours to complete.
Cons: There are no new weapons at all. There are only 2 new enemies. WHY WON’T ALYX AND GORDON JUST HAVE SEX ALREADY!! You could cut the tension with a crowbar.
Portal
Pros: Easily the most innovative game of the year, hell, of MANY years. If this doesn’t top some game of the year lists, the world has lost it’s way. I mean, the game is hilarious as well, the freakin’ companion cube already has a cult following. The cake is a lie!!
Cons (but not really): Too short. Even n00bs could beat in like 4 hours. But I have a feeling Portal 2 is going to be off-the-charts EPIC. I might even bet there’ll be a portal gun in HL Episode 3.
I am America (and so can you!) by Stephen Colbert
That’s right. I read a book. You can change your underwear now. I’ll wait.
Pros: A hilarious read for anyone that watches his show. I found myself laughing out loud at some of the ridiculous one-liners. He makes you realize the true genius of his craft. He makes fun of Bill O’Reilly’s show with the Colbert Report, but he parodies O’Reilly’s books with this one. The intricacy of this comedy is truly genius. He completely dismantles the neo-con view using nothing but itself. Colbert is a God.
Cons: The book is of the same flavor as the show, and sometimes blatantly outlandish just for the sake of it, and because he knows he’ll get away with it. Part of me wants a serious autobiography written by the real Colbert, as that is the side no one ever sees, it would make for a more interesting read.
This is officially the longest post I’ve ever written, and if you read it all the way through, then damn. Props to you. I’ll make sure to post on your wall when it’s your birthday.
Apparently out there on the internet, unbeknownst to me, there are entire sites dedicated to mashups. “Mashup” of course is one of those words people love to hate, but for better or worse it is attached to anything on the internet that uses an api and is remotely cool. I guess DiggKiller qualifies. In the past few days, I’ve been selected as a “Mashup of the Day” on two different sites. The first is programmableweb.com. I found out about this by checking the referrer traffic for my site and noticing the domain, and checking it out. The site must not have that much traffic, because I never heard of it before and they only forwarded me about 60 hits. Also, there are currently no “comments” on the page, a good indicator of anemic traffic.
The second site looked a little more credible. It’s mashupawards.com and I was notified of my award through an email (which means they actually had to visit the site, read my little blurb at the bottom and find my email address). They even urged me to choose a cool badge to display on my site, like this one:
At first I thought this was a lame excuse to get more traffic to a second-rate site, by picking a cool thing everyday and then linking back to their site with these awards. It’s a classic technique to increase traffic and google ranking. But then I noticed that the site actually looks pretty badass, and they don’t have a single advertisement on it. How to they make money? Who knows.
I guess the thing that’s truly amazing is that in the land of web 2.0, sites exist that give out awards every day that are HAND PICKED by the site’s creators, instead of being automagically chosen by user voting and complex promotion algorithms. It’s refreshing to see some people kickin’ it old school, and to me, kind of gives these awards more value. I just remembered fuzzwich does that too. Maybe it’s a new wave of retro-humanized editorial voting systems? Maybe I just spend too much time on digg.
This is kinda cool. My game DiggKiller is now considered a “hot new game” on Kongregate, and thusly appears on their front page. See if you can find it:
Good shit, if you haven’t played it yet do it!
Man, I feel stupid. Turns out those security errors from Kongregate were being thrown thanks to my lack of a crossdomain.xml file that allows access to data from off-domain swfs. kurtmargenau.com didn’t have one, so any calls to my hiscore phps were being rejected by flash, because the default is if it doesn’t find this magic xml file on the root of the domain, it doesn’t allow it to access any info from that domain. This xml file btw, is a list of domains that are allowed to access. For example, I would put “www.kongregate.com” on the list so my high scores worked, but to make it simple, I just allowed all domains, like so:
<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<!– http://www.kurtmargenau.com/crossdomain.xml –>
<cross-domain-policy>
<allow-access-from domain=”*” />
</cross-domain-policy>
Now all the folks at Kongregate can battle for high scores!
Kongregate is a pretty sick flash games community where a bunch of people play a bunch of flash games. I just submitted DiggKiller to it, now that the digg-craze has died down a bit, I’m reaching a new audience. Plus they share their ad revenue with me. YAY! Doesn’t look too bad, despite being scrunched a little smaller than the original size. Had to finagle some of the code to get it to work, and for some reason, the hi scores throw security errors when they try to load, despite the sounds, and the digg stories loading from offsite. Whatever. It’s cool.
So I’m pretty sure my game has officially “blown up” on digg. Right now it’s getting close to 800 diggs and rising quickly. The cool part about this is.. since the game is a popular gaming story, it shows up in the game itself! And people have caught on to cheating and have starting posting “fuck suck colbert environment epic kevin rose ipod” (these are the keywords that trigger powerups) comments all over the place on digg to give themselves a helping hand when they play. I’ve got to say, it’s pretty cool to be blasting away at a story in my game that IS the game.. it’s kind of like, the matrix or something. No, not really. Image below:
..and when I kill it, I get every powerup in the game simultaneously!!.. truly epic.
If you haven’t played yet, click to play!!
This is what I’ve been working on for awhile. It’s a sick 2D space shooter that implements the digg api. You shoot at enemies that increase in difficulty as they increase in diggs, and you collect comments from the stories that are scanned for keywords to give you powerups. It’s pretty cool, you should play it!
