The game was called Imperium Solaris and in addition to being responsible for the overall design I also relearned some of the Photoshop skills I had lost.  I had taken a few Photoshop and Illustrator courses while getting credits for my Multimedia and Graphic Degree and at the time it had been two years since I had felt the need to use those skills.  Using the wonderful power of the internet I found some great ways to do interface artwork, nebulae, and planet textures (though to be honest I kind of winged the planet textures).

The game was meant to be a two player space real-time strategy game.  Players would manage fleets, planets, and indeed their entire empire via the strategic map, and when it came down to fight the other player it would load in a tactical map.  Unfortunately we were using Virtools, which isn’t exactly the best development suite to use for making a full game.  The two programmers had a very hard time getting the game to work correctly.  It just didn’t want to go between the strategic map and the tactical map seamlessly.  In the end, right before it was to be presented, the entire thing broke down.

Fortunately I’ve been able to continue practicing with Photoshop and I just thought I’d share the visuals I was able to create.  Enjoy.

This is a sure blow to laptop gamers who sometimes find themselves away from a hardline or wifi hub.  Though I’d like to point out that EA has stated that dial-up will allow you to play the game.  I find this a bit funny as you can probably count the number of gamers with dial-up on one hand.  There just aren’t that many.

According to an interview, a designer for the game,  Samuel Bass, stated that “as a nice side effect, since C&C4 requires players to be online all the time in order to prevent cheating, we’ll be shipping without any form of DRM.”

This is an interesting statement.  While I believe that he meant what he said that there is no DRM in the traditional form (ie software) the simple fact that you require the player to have an active internet connection in order to play the game means that that in itself is a form of DRM.  I can say that because I am relatively certain that the game will check, at startup (at least), whether or not your CD key is valid.  I do not believe there would be a point in having an active internet connection otherwise.

So I think that while Commander and Conquer 4 will not ship with a piece of DRM, like FADE that will slowly delete the game if it detects that you have a pirated copy, it still has a DRM system in place in the requirement that the player must have an active internet connection to play the game.

Interview article: http://game-preview.tungtram.com/2009/07/pc-command-conquer-4-q-exclusive-first.html

Now the first question one might ask is:  what the heck is Evony?  You’ve probably seen a million and one adds for the thing but maybe haven’t clicked on one to find out.

Well Evony is a web browser based MMORTS game similar to the 1997 Age of Empires game in both graphical quality and game play.  Players start off with a small town and must upgrade their productivity, army, and technology buildings in order to progress.  Players can also conquer other areas which give bonuses to resource production.

Now back to the gamepolitics.com article.  Apparently there has been a recent string of comment spam events where users will post spam advertising the game.  I was intrigued as to why a legitimate business would resort to a method usually employed by less than legitimate sites/services.  I decided to dig further into this and I found out that the makers of Evony have created “iEvony” a sort of test server that most MMOs have where players can get a sneak peak at new content and features.  The only difference between iEvony and most MMO test servers is that iEvony is invite only:  you need a code from the developers to get access to iEvony.

I then decided to see if the makers of Evony have had anything to say about this.  Low and behold there is a posting from yesterday morning about this very issue:

“07-12-2009, 08:41 AM

Dear Players,

We have been excited at the success of iEvony, but we have also come across an unintended side effect of the iEvony system. Some players have abusively and unethically engaged in spamming practices on a variety of websites with the intent of boosting their credits. This practice affects site traffic and makes headaches and extra work for moderators on a variety of websites. It reflects poorly not only on these users, but also on Evony as a whole.

For this reason, we will absolutely not tolerate such spamming practices. Players who engage in spam practices (posting multiple threads from multiple accounts on the same site, attempting to get forum users to follow a link) will be aggressively pursued and sanctioned. Penalties may include: being stripped of ALL earned Credits and any Coins or items they were exchanged for; having your iEvony account permanently disabled; being temporarily or permanently banned from Evony.”

I’m a little unsure about how posting links would benefit players, but the posting suggests that somehow if you link to a certain site your in-game character will benefit.  The gamepolitics.com article was apparently under the impression that it was Evony staff doing the spamming.  But according to the Evony team it is in fact players of the game who are doing the spamming.

This would make sense to me – with a credit system in place that is based on internet traffic.  What is unclear though is why the developers would institute that sort system in the first place.  It seems as if the spam issue is an obvious consequence of that sort of system.

I myself haven’t tried to play Evony (I have gotten addicted to browser based games before and it began to interfere with my work ethic so I stay away from them) but I hope this sort of thing doesn’t impact Evony which appears to be a good game.

Update:  Please see the first comment for more information, but there appears to be much more going on than meets the eye.

But look out!  Now Universal Studios has announced that it will bring you a movie based on the arcade classic Asteroids!

That’s quite an admission and may not bode well for the future of Hollywood.

Though there is a big difference between making a movie about Doom and making a movie about Asteroids; Doom has a plot – such as it was – and characters.  Asteroids has neither a plot nor characters.  It was simply a game where you are a spaceship flying around blowing up chunks of interstellar debris.  On the one hand moviegoer/gamers can’t complain that Hollywood botched the story (see Aliens Vs Predator – which would have been a better movie if they’d followed the storyline from the AVP2 video game).  It also leaves the scriptwriters with a nearly blank slate.  All they have to do to satisfy the Asteroids requirement is to set the movie in space and have asteroids.  Lots of asteroids.

With all the remakes of old classics like the Taking of Pelham 123 or Inglorious Bastards (a sure ripoff of the Dirty Dozen movie) and now with Asteroids – The Movie I have come to the conclusion that Hollywood is like a Red Giant about to go supernova.  It has exhausted nearly all of its usable fuel (original creativity) and is about to go nova.

We can only wait and see but with the failure of Doom and the last two Resident Evil movies I cannot help but be pesimistic.

Twilight: New Moon is, as you might have guessed, the sequel to the film Twilight released last year.

I had to look up Grace, and it’s not technically a vampire movie, but there is a baby that drinks blood so I thought that was a qualifier.  According to IMDB it was released in January.

Thirst is about a priest who becomes a vampire via a failed medical experiment while longing after a woman.  It was released April 30th in South Korea and stands to have a limited US release on July 31st.

Blood: The Last Vampire is a live action version of the anime movie of the same name.  It was released May 29th.

Much of this is news to me, though I was aware of Blood: The Last Vampire and the original Twilight movie I was surprised that we have four movies (that I know of) that have been released in 2009 or are going to be released in 2009 about vampires.  Thats quite alot, at least it seems so to me.

Anyone else have that opinion?

Within a day the game became unplayable for many users because of the number of connections established with Stardock’s multiplayer servers.  This is a very big problem for a game that relies so much on it’s multiplayer component.

Why was the game unplayable?  There are a number of issues that I can think of that caused this.

The first is Stardock’s DRM philosophy.  Simply put Stardock’s position on DRM in games is that no matter what DRM system a company comes up with pirates will be able to crack it and that in the end DRM systems only hurt the legitimate customers (one need only look at EA’s initial draconian measures with Spore).  Because of this, and perhaps the early release so close to the weekend, pirates were able to get a hold of the game in near record speed and Stardock’s employees were all off for two days and thus unable to fix the issue.

Indeed Stardock reported that of the 100,000 connections established with their servers only 18,000 were from legitimate retail copies.  The rest were pirated copies.  Apparently Stardock never conceived of the possibility that so many connections would be established with their update and multiplayer servers and thus the servers did not have enough resources to deal with the large number of people online.

I do not believe that the lack of DRM on Demigod caused this issue.  In fact it appears as if the game was designed to connect to Stardock’s servers even if you were playing the game in offline mode.  It is at start up that the game connects to the server to automatically check to see if your version of the game is the latest version.  Ironically with so many connections established even the pirates were having an issue playing “their” game.

I have always questioned the logic of having a non-MMO game automatically check for updates.  While it adds an extra step I would much rather have to look for patches on Fileplanet.com or click on an in game button conveniently labeled “Check for Updates” than take the risk of this sort of thing happening to me.  It appears obvious to me that because the game automatically checks for updates the illegitimate users were having a major impact on the people that actually paid for the game.

When I first read about Stardock and their hit game Sins of a Solar Empire I was very excited that a developer finally agreed with me that DRM is not the way to deal with piracy.  This case has not changed my belief but it has certainly made me examine ways to limit the effect of piracy on the consumers and promote the purchasing of one’s product.  I think Stardock has hit on the first part of this equation but the automatic update check probably negated it.  That first part being that you must have a account with Stardock to play the game online and receive game updates.  Without the automatic updates I think that there would have been no impact on legitimate consumers at all.

The other part I think can be found in Steam’s digital distribution service.  Steam allows the purchasing and updating of games all from a simple program, but you must have an account in order to access your games.  Ideally it would be great if all the developer’s could get on board with Steam but realistically, human nature being what it is, that would give Steam far too much power over the future of the entertainment industry’s distribution system.

I think the solution to any game developer’s fear of piracy is to work with companies that provide digital distribution – such as steam – instead of slapping harsh and often invasive DRM on the legitimate consumers.

For those of you that are not familiar OnLive is a completely Internet based gaming system.  While not an existing service yet (OnLive goes into Beta this summer) the developers have stated that it would be a subscription based service and it would allow you to play newly released games and even older games as long as the rights holder (Such as EA, Ubisoft, and Activision) allows OnLive to put the games on their servers.

The service is not client side hardware based.  Instead it is reported that any computer that can play streaming video would be able to play the latest games.  Essentially games are stored on OnLive’s servers and everything is rendered there and then streamed to the user’s computer over an Internet connection.  OnLive has stated that the resolution would be dependant on the speed of your connection, with 1.5 Mbps allowing Wii level image quality and higher 4-5 Mbps needed for High Definition resolution.

Now I was a bit of a traditional gamer in that it took me a year to begin using services such as Direct2Drive to purchase games instead of going down to the local GameStop.  I suppose I am still a bit traditional in that I would be hesitant to subscribe to OnLive for a few very important reasons.

The first and most important reason is that bandwidth speeds change depending on the time of day, and with ISPs frequently bandwidth throttling at peak hours this would severely impact the image quality of the games I was playing.

Another important thing to note is that many ISPs have either implemented, or are in trial stages of, a monthly cap on the amount of data their subscribers can use per month.  Like a cell phone overage charge these charges can be very expensive.  I can imagine that the hardcore gamers like myself who migrate to this system could quickly find themselves hitting their cap early and being forced to pay overage charges.

An equally important issue is the fact that you wouldn’t be able to play the games if you had no Internet connection.  Sometimes my ISP has hardware issues following a storm here in Virginia and outages are common during the summer months and obviously people who have no Internet connection wouldn’t be able to use the service.

A question that I would pose to the developers of OnLive is whether or not I would be able to play older games on their service.  I would love to be able to play Mechwarrior 2 again, or even Privateer 2: The Darkening (which requires a hard to find slowdown patch because of the increase in clock speed on modern CPUs).  If these older games were put into the “cloud” I could potentially see a resurgence in the play of those games much like Id Software’s recent endeavour to put Quake into a browser window.

It remains to be seen how OnLive will work given the limitations mentioned above.

I was employed by Mythic Entertainment over the summer but was laid off shortly thereafter as part of a larger customer service department layoff.  I guess following that, and the promise of the job, I became discouraged with getting a job in the game industry.

Getting a job in the game industry has been my dream since I first played Chess Master in the mid 90′s.  In college I was led to believe that getting into the industry would be a matter of knowing how to write design documents and conceptual documents.  But sadly this has not been the case.

I’ve found that most jobs require the knowledge of certain 3D level editor tools such as UnrealEd or some scripting language.  Its rather hard for me to learn these programs and develop something on my own without any structure.

I’m not a programmer nor an artist so my only avenue has been either through customer service, quality assurance, or level design.  Sadly most jobs in customer service are on a contractual basis with little or no job retention.  The quality assurance jobs require experience in QA before even being considered and the level design jobs requires you to have been a part of several published games.  This for me makes it nearly impossible to get into the industry as my skillset now stands and in the last few months I’ve become heartbroken as it becomes clearer that I may never get into the industry.

I want more than anything else to become part of a creative team, even if only on an internship level.  This avenue however also appears limited as most internships require you to be a current student, which I am not.  Many companies also do not offer internships.

At this point I’m just not sure what I can do to get my foot in the door.

While games have been on other mobile platforms for some time now a truly powerful graphical platform has been absent until iPhone 2.0. With this powerful platform it is my belief that MMOs and RPGs sporting decent graphics can now enter the world stage.

One particular game caught my eye when I was browsing the games section of the iTunes’ app store: Aurora Faint: The Beginning. This is a puzzle based game which allows you to create a character and then level the character up by solving Tetris-like puzzles. Once you level up you gain access to new abilities that assist you in solving even more challenging puzzles. This RPG even takes advantage of the iPhone’s unique motion sensing technology when playing puzzles which adds an entirely new level of gameplay.

While I am unsure of the multiplayer aspect of the game and how that factors into the overall enjoyability of the game (I don’t know anyone who owns an iPhone other than myself) the game does feature an email search function so you can add them into the game. The game has some sort of party system and again, since I don’t know anyone to invite, I am unsure how the party system effects gameplay.

But regardless we may in the next few years see pay per play MMOs as graphically impressive as Ragnorok Online or Twelve Sky.

Here are some images of Aurora Faint.

I have to say that the program is amazing.  Though difficult for me to get used to.  It is difficult because the method for doing things in UnrealEd is very similar to 3D Studio Max and other more tradition CAD programs, something I have a little experience using.  Coming from Maya it is a less intuitive experience, at least as far as navigating the different window panes.

Though I have only gotten into the first tutorial I am finding that the tutorial is clear and concise and the people doing the tutorials are sometimes humorous in their explanations.  I recommend that anyone interested in UnrealEd buy the Collectors Edition just for the tutorial videos.