Quest to Nowhere

With so much talk about FarmVille, I felt like it was something that I needed to play to understand why it was popular. I had my own theories for why people played FarmVille, especially after reading A. J. Partick Liszkiewicz article a few months back, but figured that I probably wouldn’t understand it without actually trying it out. So about two months ago I started playing, and recently I started playing Zynga’s new Facebook game FrontierVille, and I think I’ve got an understanding now of what gets people to play these games.

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I started a Tumblr blog thing. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to use it for yet. Probably things that are too short for here, and too long for Twitter. So basically quick thoughts on things, links to interesting stuff, and other whatnots. That seems to make the most sense.

Playing Red Dead Redemption I found myself thinking a lot about the story, specifically within the context of the objective vs. subjective storytelling (which I discussed in a previous post.) The one thing that I kept coming back to was that within the game it seemed that there were two John Marstons, the one that Rockstar created for the game, and the one that the players create for themselves as they play the game. The players’ John Marston exists between the cut-scenes and in-game dialogues between characters, while the Rockstar John Marston exists in those scripted moments.

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As I explained in the last post, I’m working on making a comic book point-and-click adventure game called Quest to Nowhere: Summer Days. In order to do this, and have it look good, I’m hiring an artist friend of mine to draw the comic pages for the game.

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I know some people have been asking for me to do a blog post about what I’m doing for my capstone project (the last thing I have to do to complete my Masters program,) and now I feel I can finally talk about it. I probably could have before, but I wanted to wait until it was signed off on and was officially happening.

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I have spent more time then I care to imagine playing videogames, a lot of that has been playing multiplayer shooter games like Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, Perfect Dark, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, and the like. As such, over that time I’ve come to some derive some theories on how multiplayer levels should be designed, based on my experiences.

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While I was at GDC this past year I went to a lecture called “Get Your Game out of my Movie! Interactive Storytelling in Mass Effect 2,” which was being given by Armando Troisi of BioWare. The one thing he said that has been stuck in my head since then was this idea of objective and subjective storytelling.

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This was the best convention/expo I have ever been to, and yet I feel like I barely did anything. I mainly went to panels (the ones I went to were all interesting, especially the Naughty Dog LIVE panel,) and went to the concerts.

I played some games, like the new Behemoth game (whose name escapes me right now,) also tried out Splinter Cell Conviction’s co-op mode, and played some of Split Second. I would have played some APB if I wasn’t already on the beta (but I think that’s all I can say about that right now.) The Behemoth game is … Continue Reading

Heading to Boston tomorrow for PAX East. I’m sure I’ll have things to talk about when I get back… maybe.

I might be at the Halolz meetup, depending on what else is going on at that time/if I’m hungry since its supposed to be at the food court at noon on Saturday.

Back from a week at GDC 2010 in San Francisco. It was both exhausting, and amazing. I got to meet some really cool people again this year, foremost was Amy Hennig the Creative Director at Naughty Dog (she wrote Uncharted 1 and 2.) Continue Reading